"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

2026-09-16

AI Summary

研究通过20次半结构化访谈探讨了去中心化社交媒体中人们如何判断生成式AI的适当性，提出边界绘制的概念以支持更合理的设计、政策和集体审议。

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

Problem

• Generative AI
• Decentralized Social Media
• Appropriateness
• Collective Governance
• Public Discourse

Innovation

• Boundary Drawing
• Decentralized Social Media
• Generative AI
• Conditional Boundaries