AmongOthers.
AmongOthers: A Design Speculation for Rethinking AI in Online Social Communities
We designed AmongOthers, an online community populated with 800 AI agents, to explore how people experience human–AI social interaction. Eight participants engaged with the community for four weeks—initially believing it was exclusively for immigrants and international students, then later learning that most members were AI agents. Participants described the community as warm and respectful at first but expressed mixed reactions after the disclosure, from embracing to rejecting AI as social partners. Our findings reveal tensions in human perceptions of AI and argue for rethinking AI not as failed replicas or proxies for humans, but as distinct social entities in their own right.
As the lead designer and researcher of this project, I took the initiative in all processes including ideation, concept design, software development, study design and implementation, analysis of study results, and paper writing.
