Beyond the hype: Oxford & Berlin study uncovers four faces of ChatGPT’s early adopters
28 January 2026
New international study identifies four distinct archetypes of early AI users and challenges the "one-size-fits-all" notion of AI adoption.
Latest news
Is an under-16 social media ban the right course?
23 January 2026
Dr Victoria Nash, Associate Professor and Senior Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, researches the governance challenges of digital technologies, with a particular focus on online safety, content moderation and platform regulation.
New study finds that ChatGPT amplifies global inequalities
20 January 2026
New analysis from Oxford and Kentucky researchers shows AI systems reproduce long‑standing global biases
Next events
09
Feb
Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series
Keep a Diary, Study Diaries: The Personal and The Public in a Shifting Online World
15:30 -17:00
With Dr Janet SalmonsFunny thing about change: sometimes it goes forward and sometimes it circles back. For a time, it seemed like email and user-created blogs were going extinct in favor of social media. Now those trends appear to be reversing.
Four graduate degrees
Academic spotlight
Find out more about research by OII academics
Dr Janaki Srinivasan
Associate Professor Digital South Asian Studies
Janaki's research examines the politics of digital exclusion in India. She uses ethnographic and archival research to examine how gender, caste and class have shaped the use of information and information technologies in varied contexts.
Professor Brent Mittelstadt
Professor of Data Ethics and Policy
Professor Brent Mittelstadt is a data ethicist and philosopher specializing in AI ethics, professional ethics, and technology law and policy. He is the founder/coordinator of the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) programme.
Dr Bernie Hogan
Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Bernie Hogan examines how to capture, represent and think about social networks, especially personal social networks. His work focuses on the role of design in social media, network capture techniques and theories of relationships.
Latest projects
Worker Voice and AI Adoption
This project investigates how worker representation in German firms shapes AI use and adoption, asking whether employee voice at firms can steer AI toward complementing workers rather than automating them.
Stewardship of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
The Synthetic Society Lab aims to improve how we research, access, and use sensitive human data. The fellowship will advance an evidence-based science of privacy engineering to make research using digital traces safe and reliable.
AfriGPT: LLMs over SMS
This project investigates how low-resource AI chatbots shape labour and education outcomes in digitally underserved communities in Sierra Leone.
Latest report
By Andres Raieste, Andri Rebane, Madis Tapupere, Keegan McBride
In a world increasingly defined by crises—from pandemics and climate disasters to escalating wars—governments that fail to build digital resilience risk crumbling under pressure.
Press coverage
Matthew McConaughey trademarks iconic phrase to stop AI misuse
BBC News, 15 January 2026
Professor Sandra Wachter comments on the trend of celebrities trademarking their identity to protect themselves against AI deepfakes.
Planet goal: data centers and their energy and water consumption
RTVE Noticias, 30 January 2026
Dr Ana Valdivia spoke to Spanish broadcaster RTVE about data centres, energy consumption and the environmental impact of AI.
Regulating sexual content online has always been a challenge – how we got here
The Conversation, 30 January 2026
Professor Helen Margetts and Professor Cosmina Dorobantu explore how free‑speech claims are used to sidestep a recurring problem: sexual content taking over new technologies, legal or not.
