Sachita Nishal
PhD Candidate, Northwestern University
Hi, I’m Sachita! I recently finished my PhD at Northwestern University, where I was advised by Dr. Nick Diakopoulos. I’m tremendously excited to be joining as a postdoc at the UW Center for an Informed Public in Fall 2026, where I will be mentored by Dr. Emma Spiro and Dr. Gary Hsieh!
I study and design sociotechnical systems that help people make sense of a complex online information ecosystem. I’m interested in how novel technologies (social platforms, tools for thought, generative AI) reshape sensemaking, science communication, and creative work, and in what AI slop and synthetic media do to the communities and infrastructures through which people make meaning together.
During my PhD, I designed interactive AI-infused systems to support science journalists in exploring and making sense of scientific information during newsgathering. This research surfaced latent value trade-offs and proposed design patterns to help journalists navigate these more thoughtfully and intentionally, in the interest of accurate, timely, useful science communication.
You can email me at: sachita [dot] nishal [at] gmail [dot] com
News
A long overdue job update, but I will be joining as a postdoc at the UW Center for an Informed Public in Fall 2026, where I will be mentored by Dr. Emma Spiro and Dr. Gary Hsieh. I’m really really really excited!
Marijn Sax, Kimon Kieslich, and I have new work that argues for a sociotechnical approach to defining and analyzing AI slop, counter to approaches that might rely solely on whether slop satisfies individual users. The more urgent question is what it does to the communities and conditions through which meaning and creative value are made, we argue in this piece published at ACM AI Letters.
My coauthor Jack Bandy and I published an audit about the gendered tropes that manifest, even without prompting, in fictional stories generated by LLMs. This audit has implications for how we study implicit bias and storytelling with AI, and was presented at the EvalEval workshop at ACL 2026.
Recent Blog Posts
Learning to scope (and also breathe) —
Some idle thoughts in the aftermath of my prospectus defense
One way news practitioners can think about uncertainty in LLM outputs —
Recent write-up on LLMs and uncertainty for the GAIN blog
A prototype newsgathering tool for science journalists —
A recent write-up about work presented at C+J 2024.