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Futuring Social Assemblages: How Enmeshing AIs into Social Life Challenges the Individual and the Interpersonal

Lingqing Wang, Yingting Gao, Chidimma Lois Anyi, Ashok Goel

TL;DR

The paper addresses how AI embedded in everyday social life reshapes human relationships and sociality. It adopts a three-phase participatory-speculative design approach, using design fictions and storyboards to explore potential futures of social AI and 18–participant interviews to surface user perspectives. The findings reveal tensions around interpersonal filtering, non-primary-user privacy, blurred agency/identity, and datafication-driven anxiety, arguing that a purely user-centered design paradigm fails to capture these relational dynamics. The authors advocate a shift toward provocative, interpersonal design that foregrounds long-term social impacts and the rights of others involved in social interactions, with practical implications for responsible social-AI design and policy within HCI.

Abstract

Recent advances in AI are integrating AI into the fabric of human social life, creating transformative, co-shaping relationships between humans and AI. This trend makes it urgent to investigate how these systems, in turn, shape their users. We conducted a three-phase design study with 24 participants to explore this dynamic. Our findings reveal critical tensions: (1) social AI often exacerbates the very interpersonal problems it is designed to mitigate; (2) it introduces nuanced privacy harms for secondary users inadvertently involved in AI-mediated social interactions; and (3) it can threaten the primary user's personal agency and identity. We argue these tensions expose a problematic tendency in the user-centered paradigm, which often prioritizes immediate user experience at the expense of core human values like interpersonal ethics and self-efficacy. We call for a paradigm shift toward a more provocative and relational design perspective that foregrounds long-term social and personal consequences.

Futuring Social Assemblages: How Enmeshing AIs into Social Life Challenges the Individual and the Interpersonal

TL;DR

The paper addresses how AI embedded in everyday social life reshapes human relationships and sociality. It adopts a three-phase participatory-speculative design approach, using design fictions and storyboards to explore potential futures of social AI and 18–participant interviews to surface user perspectives. The findings reveal tensions around interpersonal filtering, non-primary-user privacy, blurred agency/identity, and datafication-driven anxiety, arguing that a purely user-centered design paradigm fails to capture these relational dynamics. The authors advocate a shift toward provocative, interpersonal design that foregrounds long-term social impacts and the rights of others involved in social interactions, with practical implications for responsible social-AI design and policy within HCI.

Abstract

Recent advances in AI are integrating AI into the fabric of human social life, creating transformative, co-shaping relationships between humans and AI. This trend makes it urgent to investigate how these systems, in turn, shape their users. We conducted a three-phase design study with 24 participants to explore this dynamic. Our findings reveal critical tensions: (1) social AI often exacerbates the very interpersonal problems it is designed to mitigate; (2) it introduces nuanced privacy harms for secondary users inadvertently involved in AI-mediated social interactions; and (3) it can threaten the primary user's personal agency and identity. We argue these tensions expose a problematic tendency in the user-centered paradigm, which often prioritizes immediate user experience at the expense of core human values like interpersonal ethics and self-efficacy. We call for a paradigm shift toward a more provocative and relational design perspective that foregrounds long-term social and personal consequences.
Paper Structure (38 sections, 3 figures, 6 tables)

This paper contains 38 sections, 3 figures, 6 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Conceptualizing Human-AI Co-Adaptation as Entangled Assemblages
  4. AI for Social Interaction in Digital Spaces
  5. Envisioning Human-AI Assemblage
  6. Methodology
  7. Study Scope and Participants
  8. Phase 1: Ideation
  9. Phase 2: Design
  10. Phase 3: Elicitation
  11. Findings
  12. Interpersonal Filtering: Short-Term Ease, Long-Term Erosion
  13. The Filter Bubble: Managing Incoming Signals
  14. The Authenticity Mask: Augmenting Outgoing Signals
  15. The Feedback Loop: Inauthentic Escalation at Society
  16. ...and 23 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Overview of the three-phrase study
  • Figure 2: Two Steps in the Storyboard Generation Workflow.
  • Figure 3: The storyboard for AI design at a social capability level of Omniscient Social Beings in Dimension 2 for the stage of Social Formation in Dimension 1.