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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how integrating AI into social life impacts human relationships, revealing tensions such as exacerbating interpersonal issues, privacy harms, and threats to personal agency, advocating for a relational design approach.

Contribution

It introduces a new relational design perspective addressing long-term social and personal impacts of social AI, challenging the traditional user-centered paradigm.

Findings

Social AI can worsen interpersonal problems.

Privacy harms extend to secondary users.

AI can threaten user agency and identity.

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.