Jiuheng He

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Critical AI Studies at NYU Shanghai. My work examines the social impact and governance of AI, with interests in human–AI collaboration, the interpretability and authority of algorithmic outputs, and how expertise and labor are reshaped around large language models. I finished my PhD in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in 2025.

My dissertation, “The Go Community and AlphaGo: An Ethnographic Study of an Encounter with AI,” traces how the Go world transformed after AlphaGo’s 2016 victory over Lee Sedol. Drawing on fieldwork, I show how Go AI moved from “mysterious challenger” to a recognized contributor and authority on Go knowledge, while human experts shifted from knowledge authority to interpreters of AI-generated play. The project also analyzes new ethics and governance issues in the community, including cheating concerns and boundary work around when AI enters human practices.

My current research launches a new project on prompt engineering. I study prompt engineers as key mediators between users, business objectives, regulatory expectations, and LLMs—an “interface layer” where soft governance is enacted through instructions, refusals, safety filters, and iterative tuning. Using multi-sited ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis, I investigate how prompt strategies shape model behavior, how organizations decide what counts as “effective” or “ethical,” and how major AI releases reconfigure public discourse on prompt engineering .

My manuscript (submitted to Big Data & Society) “Redefining human Go experts in the post-AI era: a perspective from sociology of professions” is here.

Please find my CV here (Updated Sept.2025)