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

Paper Title

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

Publication Info

• Topic area: The integration of AI into human social life and its implications on interpersonal dynamics and individual identity.
• Keywords: Social AI, human-AI interaction, user-centered design, interpersonal ethics, agency, privacy, identity, speculative design, co-adaptation, relational design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Current AI systems integrated into social contexts often prioritize immediate user experience, neglecting long-term impacts on interpersonal relationships, privacy, and personal identity. The dominant user-centered design paradigm fails to account for broader social dynamics and ethical considerations.
• Significance: As AI becomes deeply embedded in human social life, it has the potential to reshape interpersonal connections, user agency, and societal norms. Understanding these transformations is critical to designing systems that align with core human values.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have explored AI's role in task-oriented scenarios and its immediate effects on social interactions, but little is known about its long-term impact on human sociality. This paper builds on theories of human-AI co-adaptation and speculative design to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A three-phase design study combining participatory and speculative design methods to explore the integration of AI into digital social interactions and its implications.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of four core tensions in AI-mediated social interactions: authenticity, privacy, agency, and quantification.
  2. Introduction of a two-dimensional design space for AI in social contexts, encompassing a cyclical process of relationship formation and levels of AI social capabilities.
  3. Advocacy for shifting from user-centered to relational and provocative design paradigms to address long-term social and ethical consequences.
  4. Empirical insights into how AI reshapes interpersonal dynamics and individual identity.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Phase 1: Ideation workshops with 12 participants to explore experiences and envision AI-supported social interactions.
  2. Phase 2: Creation of 15 speculative design storyboards based on a two-dimensional design space.
  3. Phase 3: Elicitation interviews with 18 participants to gather reactions and insights on future human-AI social assemblages.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • AI-mediated social interactions risk eroding authenticity, creating privacy concerns for non-primary users, and diminishing personal agency.
  • Quantification of sociality by AI induces anxiety and misalignment with human values.
  • Participants expressed skepticism about AI's ability to capture the nuances of human sociality.
• Advantage over baselines: The study goes beyond immediate utility-focused research by addressing long-term and relational impacts of AI in social contexts.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants: 24 online graduate students with technical backgrounds.
  • Methods: Semi-structured interviews, thematic analysis, and speculative design storyboards.
  • Metrics: Qualitative insights into user perceptions, concerns, and envisioned futures.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Homogeneous participant pool (online graduate students in computer science).
  • Narrow focus on professional and educational social contexts.
  • Speculative nature limits real-world applicability.
  • Cultural specificity to Western norms; future studies should include diverse populations and contexts.

Summary

This study investigates the integration of AI into human social life, revealing critical tensions around authenticity, privacy, agency, and the quantification of sociality. Through a three-phase design study, the authors identify the risks of current user-centered paradigms and propose a shift toward relational and provocative design approaches. The findings highlight the need to account for broader interpersonal dynamics and ethical considerations in AI design. While limited by its speculative nature and participant demographics, the research provides valuable insights into the transformative potential of human-AI social assemblages and offers a framework for future exploration.