Who stands behind the words? | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | Deb Roy
How to repair the link that AI has severed between speech and speaker

AI can now mass-produce fluent, usable speech with no one accountable for it, hollowing out the trust that public life depends on. In this piece Deb Roy argues the loss is “standing”: the right to have one’s words count, backed by answering for them. The fix isn’t better models but institutions that anchor every word to an accountable human.

Campus Trade
Helping new MIT students discover the stories that make campus special

A new campus-wide trading card game designed to help 1100 incoming first-year MIT students start deeper and more personal conversations as a part of Orientation Week. 

CCC and Google Xi Launch “New Social Forms”
Initiative explores new rituals, formats, and structures for coming together

What are the structural building blocks of how people come together—and how do different configurations shape what groups can actually do together? Many of the forms we rely on were inherited rather than designed, built to convey information rather than build trust. They are creaking under the weight of seismic changes in our social and technological lives.

VoiceTrace
Community voices you can check

Every year, cities, school districts, and government agencies ask communities for input. Residents fill out surveys, attend meetings, and share what matters to them. Then a summary appears and a decision gets made. But the path between the two is opaque. Did your voice actually shape the outcome? There is currently no way to know.

VoiceTrace is a provenance architecture for stakeholder engagement that makes that path traceable. Rather than asking communities to accept that their input was heard, it gives them the infrastructure to verify it.

Words Without Consequence | Deb Roy | The Atlantic
What does it mean to have speech without a speaker?

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively—deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises—while bearing no vulnerability for what they say.

Boston Stories, Unscripted
The realtalk@Boston Release Party

On the evening of November 10, 2025, more than 150 Bostonians came together with members from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) for the realtalk@Boston release party — a celebration of the realtalk@Boston project: two years of neighborhood conversations where hundreds of residents shared their hopes, frustrations, and dreams for the future as a first step toward a more connected

Study: AI chatbots provide less-accurate information to vulnerable users
Research from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication finds leading AI models perform worse for users with lower English proficiency, less formal education, and non-US origins.

Large language models have been championed as tools that could democratize access to information worldwide, offering knowledge in a user-friendly interface regardless of a person’s background or location. However, new research from CCC suggests these artificial intelligence systems may actually perform worse for the very users who could most benefit from them.

Forage
Understanding Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Sensemaking for Community Conversations

Forage is a search engine that allows you to explore conversational data more deeply than with standard keyword search. Pose queries in natural language to explore relevant excerpts and an analysis, complete with citations, that synthesizes insights to answer your question.

Meet Boston, Unscripted: realtalk@Boston Portal Goes Live
Hearing Boston’s people, in their own voices, is a first step toward rebuilding trust in public discourse

What does Boston sound like when you stop to listen? Today, realtalk@Boston invites you to do just that—with the launch of a new public-facing portal where you can listen to hundreds of Bostonians, in their own voices, share stories about their neighborhoods, hopes, frustrations, and dreams for the future of their city.

Reimagining Civil Discourse for the Next Generation
Summer fellowship program engages Boston youth in dialogue through journalistic storytelling, emerging technologies, and public conversations

This past summer, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, its closely affiliated non profit, Cortico, and GBH’s FRONTLINE hosted 11 Boston students, ages 16 -21 as FRONTLINE fellows for a six-week paid fellowship at MIT’s Media Lab.

CCC Newsletter, Issue 13 (Spring/Summer 2026)

Realtalk about MIT funding, words without consequence, Foraging for conversation themes, conference presentations and much more.

We’re Hiring
UROP developer to design & build AI-mediated social interfaces

CCC is seeking a student to assist with full stack and/or hardware development to help create AI-mediated social interfaces over the spring semester. 

New Social Forms
Exploring new rituals, formats, and structures for coming together

The MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC), in collaboration with Google Xi, is launching New Social Forms—a translational research and practice initiative focused on exploring the structural building blocks of how people come together — and how different configurations shape what groups can actually do together.