Jiuheng He

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Critical AI Studies at NYU Shanghai, where I work with Dr. Jing Wang. My work examines the social impact and governance of AI, with interests in human–AI collaboration, how algorithmic outputs come to carry authority, and how expertise and labor are being reshaped around large language models. I received my PhD in Science and Technology Studies from 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 source of authoritative Go knowledge, while human experts shifted from knowledge authorities to interpreters of AI-generated play. The project also analyzes emerging ethics and governance issues in the community, including cheating controversies and boundary work around when and how 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. They occupy 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” prompting, and how major AI releases reconfigure public discourse around this emerging occupation. Adjacent to this, I am developing interests in silicon sampling and AI benchmarks as sites where the epistemic authority of LLMs is constructed—how synthetic populations come to substitute for human subjects in social science, and how benchmark performance is made into a credible measure of “intelligence.”

Recent publication: He, J. (2026). Redefining human Go experts in the post-AI era: Perspectives from the sociology of professions and expertise. Big Data & Society, 13(2), 20539517261465667. [PDF]

Please find my CV here (Updated Jul. 2026)