Ziv Epstein is a postdoctoral associate at MIT sitting between Schwarzman School of Computing (SCC) and History, Theory & Criticism (HTC) in the School of Architecture. His current research explores how to audit the values amplified by social media ranking algorithms, and how to steer these algorithms to align with human values. Beyond social media, he is also interested in the impacts of AI on creative production in settings such as visual media and interpretative labor (e.g. divination). He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University (2023-2025), and received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab (2023) where his dissertation focused on new ways to operationalize and measure attention on social media and implications for fighting misinformation online. He has published papers in venues such as the general interest journals Nature, Science and PNAS, as well as top-tier computer science proceedings such as CHI and CSCW. His work has received widespread media attention in outlets like the New York Times, Scientific American, and Fast Company. He is also a practicing multimedia artist whose work has been featured in Ars Electronica, the MIT Museum, and Burning Man.