🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the disruptive impact of generative AI (AIGC) on self-governance in online communities, focusing on three key risks faced by Reddit moderators: declining content quality, erosion of community trust, and imbalanced rule enforcement. Through 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews with active moderators, analyzed via thematic coding and grounded theory, the research systematically uncovers AIGC’s profound effects on communal social value and collaborative normative structures—the first such empirical investigation. Findings reveal that current technical detection methods are inefficient and time-intensive, whereas community-driven norm co-creation practices significantly mitigate AIGC-related disruptions. Accordingly, the study proposes a novel governance paradigm—“human-centered co-governance over technological dependency”—which reorients moderation toward participatory, values-aligned collective action. This framework offers a theoretically grounded and empirically informed, locally contextualized pathway for platform governance and AI ethics, bridging critical gaps between algorithmic affordances and sociotechnical sustainability.
📝 Abstract
Generative AI has begun to alter how we work, learn, communicate, and participate in online communities. How might our online communities be changed by generative AI? To start addressing this question, we focused on online community moderators' experiences with AI-generated content (AIGC). We performed fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews with moderators of Reddit communities that restrict the use of AIGC. Our study finds that rules about AIGC are motivated by concerns about content quality, social dynamics, and governance challenges. Moderators fear that, without such rules, AIGC threatens to reduce their communities' utility and social value. We find that, despite the absence of foolproof tools for detecting AIGC, moderators were able to somewhat limit the disruption caused by this new phenomenon by working with their communities to clarify norms. However, moderators found enforcing AIGC restrictions challenging, and had to rely on time-intensive and inaccurate detection heuristics in their efforts. Our results highlight the importance of supporting community autonomy and self-determination in the face of this sudden technological change, and suggest potential design solutions that may help.
