I spent the last week at CHI2026; here are some of my reflections.

AI has eaten the world.

My conservative estimate is that 90% of the content at the conference was directly about AI, and another 5-6% was indirectly about it. I expressed to someone nearby my surprise at the amount of coverage given to the topic, and they said, “Well, what did you expect at an AI conference?” Right… that basically is what the conference has become.

The conference is made up of what is submitted, and what was submitted was a whole lot of LLM and agent research; I guess that’s either a reflection of what the world cares about, or an indictment about what academics are chasing, or both. It’s not what I care about, though, and so that was disappointing to me. It also felt unnecessary. It felt like a lot of research was really about something else, and had been branded with AI, or agentic, or LLM, or some other buzzword. Good marketing for your paper, I guess? But distracting from the core of the content.

I know I’m in the literal and figurative minority here, but I did pick up on fatigue from some other people, fatigue of the same language and a singular focus. AI aside, the work was extraordinarily hit or miss, and largely miss; I know this view is shared by others, given the nature of nearly all of the conversations I had or overheard. So if the work isn’t strong without it, wiping a little LLM on its lips doesn’t really do much…

The conference is too big to be useful

The conference was huge. Huuuuuugeee. There were 5000 people there; 6725 papers were submitted, and about 1600 accepted, so there were 26 tracks running in parallel. Each session had seven papers; each presenter had ten minutes to present. The whole format is just silly. If you attend a conference to meet people, you’ll be overwhelmed. If you attend a conference to learn something, you’ll get a ten minute introduction with a massive fear of missing out on the other 25 ten minute introductions happening concurrently. If you attend to be inspired, it’s a crapshoot. And if, like me, you attend to present your work, you’ll encounter a room of people who—if they are interested in engaging—have no way to do it; in the two minutes for questions, no discussion is happening.

The conference is about tenure, not knowledge

I think academic conferences used to be intended for knowledge sharing, discussion and debate. This conference is not that. It’s a venue for supporting the peer-review, publishing, and tenure game, and by design, there is no room for discourse because it doesn't matter. It’s sort of a machine: papers come in one side, tenure “points” come out the other. The content is largely ancillary.

CHI has a reputation, and was described to me in classes and numerous times in person as being the “currency” of the profession. Fine, let’s call it that: the goal of the conference is to provide a venue for publishing content in support of achieving tenure. So, it’s a journal. It’s the proceedings, not the event, that are important. But CHI is clinging to its old model. I did not want to come to the conference, but I wanted my paper published, and the only way to do this was to present it: the paper would not be accepted into the digital library if someone did not present it in person (with virtual accommodations made only for those with actual Visa issues).

My conclusion: CHI is not a good fit for me.

I used to enjoy the conference. I last went in 2008 or 2009, and remember finding value in a number of ways. The conference was very different then. It was much smaller, and was shorter. Although I’m not sure it was any better curated, it felt that way because of the smaller amount of parallel tracks and the shorter duration of the whole event. I think (but am not sure) that the sessions had fewer papers, and each presenter had much longer to describe their work. This meant that there was time for reflection, and instead of a talk being a QR-code advertisement for their paper (fine, I did it too), the talk could actually expand on some of the things in the paper.

It was also much more intimate. I made a lot of friends at CHI, and at other conferences that had only a few hundred attendees, because I sort of had to: any conversation inevitably led to conversation with someone else. There’s no way that can happen here, and so it didn’t. I talked to the people I know. I can’t imagine being a new student or academic and trying to break through the wall of noise; one would have to be very brave to approach someone new and try to make a meaningful connection.

I think that conferences in general are probably no longer valuable for me. I want to experience things with focus and with some level of reflection; the “lightning” style presentations aren’t compelling, and I’m sort of beyond the inspirational TED stuff, too. I will stick to publishing primarily in journals.

I don’t, however, regret the trip. I was curious about the machine that is CHI, and now I have a more sensible and reasonable view of it and the role it plays in academia. I had a great time exploring Barcelona. Highly recommend the contemporary art museum; the work was Absolutely Not My Style, but I spent several hours sitting outside and watching the skateboarders. It was great.