Angèle Christin
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Angèle Christin is an associate professor of Communication (and, by courtesy, Sociology), Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Fellow, and HAI Senior Fellow at Stanford University. She studies the social life of algorithms, platforms, and AI through qualitative studies of professional sites transformed by computation.e.
Angèle Christin joins the Paris IAS in October 2026 for three month as part of the "Distinguished Fellowship program" developed in collaboration with PostGenAI@Paris, led by Sorbonne University. Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to promote ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully rooted in the major challenges of our time.
The Paris IAS welcomes international researchers to support them in their research on artificial intelligence, its consequences for our societies and the prospects it offers for the future.
Research projects
Critical AI Studies; Ethnography; Digital Studies.
AI in the Sky: How Generative AI Reshapes Scientific Discovery in Astrophysics
Since 2022, Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken contemporary societies by storm. Venture capital and financial markets have been pouring stupendous amounts of money into AI efforts and startups, while governments around the globe encouraged their researchers and companies to win the geopolitical “AI race.” The amount of funding and media coverage surrounding LLMs has been overwhelming, often silencing critical perspectives on the labor practices of data annotation companies or the environmental impact of data centers.
In this context, science has emerged as a poster child to illustrate the benefits of AI technologies. Initiatives such as AlphaFold’s protein folding, led by Google’s DeepMind, inspired many disciplines to argue that GenAI would lead to revolutionary advances. Most scientists now use GenAI as a daily part of their work, especially when their research involves coding. At the same time, scientists have also warned of problems associated with using GenAI for science, especially in terms of academic rigor, honesty, and critical skills. Researchers highlighted the epistemic risks associated with GenAI and how these technologies might erode trust in science. Early deployment of GenAI in the physical and astrophysical sciences show both promise and pitfalls. For instance, in an experiment conducted at the Space Telescope Science Institute, professional astronomers valued an LLM-powered literature bot but also flagged shortcomings such as shallow synthesis and misplaced confidence.
The widespread adoption and vibrant debates surrounding the use of GenAI in science call for systematic inquiry. What do scientists want from GenAI? What are their hopes and fears? And what is the opportunity cost of engaging with GenAI versus with human collaborators for scientific training and discovery? These questions about values, trade-offs, and trust are central to Christin's investigation of how astrophysicists navigate this new collaborative landscape.
Astrophysics provides a unique lens on the challenges of using LLMs and AI agents in science. The field is data-intensive, open, and highly computational. Progress depends on large public datasets (such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory), reproducible pipelines, and references to a large literature (NASA ADS, which covers the literature corpus in astrophysics, indexes over 15 million resources). These features make astrophysics both an early adopter of AI tools and an ideal “stress test” for responsible LLM integration.
Angèle Christin is currently conducting intensive ethnographic fieldwork with astrophysicists, cosmologists, and astronomers at Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics and the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), examining how AI is transforming their daily scientific practices. In Paris, Christin plans to add a comparative dimension to this project by conducting fieldwork at a French astrophysics lab.
Key publications
Christin, A. 2020. Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. Princeton University Press.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvthhdtc
Kellogg, K.C, M.A. Valentine, and A. Christin. 2020. “Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control.” Academy of Management Annals 14(1): 366-410.
DOI: 10.5465/annals.2018.0174
Christin, A. 2018. “Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Journalism in the United States and France.” American Journal of Sociology 123(5): 1382-1415.
DOI: 10.1086/696137
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