Hi, just call me Danish(daa-nish)

I can be best reached through my email or my LinkedIn.

I’m a first year Computer Science PhD Student at Indiana University, advised by Dr. Mary Jean Amon.

I obtained my undergraduate degree from IU as well and was very fortunate to be advised by Dr. Filippo Menczer at Observatory On Social Media at Indiana Univeristy(OSoMe@IU). Previously I’ve also worked with Dr. David Crandall at the IU Computer Vision Lab.

I’m broadly fascinated by Generative AI, both how people use it and the pitfalls it can create, and I’m committed to digging into this technology at a deeper level to build customizable, explainable systems. From a computational social science perspective, I study the societal harms of generative models like deepfakes and toxic content on social platforms. On the mechanistic side, I probe vision-language models for object hallucination and concept evolution. Ultimately, I want to bridge both worlds: understanding the social issues these tools raise and uncovering their inner workings so we can design safer, more transparent AI.

Publications and Pre-prints

Prefilled responses enhance zero-shot detection of AI-generated images (2025)
Kachwala, Z., Danishjeet Singh, Yang, D., & Menczer, F.
arxiv preprint
TLDR; We show that prefilling Vision-Language Model responses with “Let’s examine the style and synthesis artifacts” boosts AI-generated image detection by up to 24% without any training. This simple technique generalizes across 16 different image generators and outperforms standard prompting methods—basically, we guide the model to focus on the right visual cues by starting its response for it.

Characteristics and prevalence of fake social media profiles with AI-generated faces (2024)
Yang, K.C., Danishjeet Singh & Menczer, F.
Published in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.
TLDR; A tiny fraction of Twitter profiles use AI‑generated face photos, yet those accounts often disseminate scams and spam; by noting that such fake faces have their eyes in exactly the same place, we could identify them and estimated about 10,000 active accounts of this type.

Recent News [See All Updates]

2025:09 Our paper Prefilled responses enhance zero-shot detection of AI-generated images has been accepted to the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Generative and Protective AI for Content Creation.

2025.08 Starting my Computer Science PhD at IU Luddy with Dr. Mary Jean Amon as my advisor, I will be working on designing and studying dynamic Human-AI teams.

2025.05 New pre-print alert, Prefilled responses enhance zero-shot detection of AI-generated images out on arxiv now.

Projects for creative and serious work!!

Tools & Software that some may find helpful.

Miscellaneous shenanigans basically