With rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), generative AI (GenAI) is transforming people's life and work across various domains. Unlike previous AI technologies that are often feminized, most of these GenAI tools are non-gendered, potentially preventing users from applying gender stereotypes. However, GenAI's use of natural language can evoke social perceptions including gender attribution, making it susceptible to gender associations. Using two online experiments, we explored how GenAI's removal of gender could mitigate individuals' gender stereotypes toward it, and how certain linguistic cues could trigger gender stereotypes even if it is non-gendered. We found that the removal of AI's gender did mitigate gender stereotypes toward it, but only to an extent. Additionally, gendered linguistic cues such as politeness, apologies, and tentative language (or lack thereof) could trigger gender stereotypes toward non-gendered AI. We contribute to HCI and CSCW research by providing a timely investigation into individuals' gender stereotypes toward GenAI agents, and one of the first to examine the profound impact of language style on users' perceptions and attributions of social characteristics to GenAI. Our findings shed light on the purposeful and responsible design of GenAI that prioritizes promoting gender equality, thereby ensuring that technological advancements align with evolving social values.

Social VR's focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to intensified and more physicalized forms of harassment than other online contexts. Therefore, a growing body of HCI and CSCW work has explored multiple strategies and mechanisms to prevent and mitigate harassment risks in social VR. However, existing works have also highlighted a fundamental challenge in mitigating harassment in social VR - the apparent lack of consensus among social VR users on how to explicitly define harassment and what behaviors should be considered harassing in social VR. In this work, we aim to offer new knowledge on the uncertainty about how harassment is defined and perceived in social VR, particularly by learning from social VR users who have experienced both sides of harassment accusations . Based on interviews with 12 participants with diverse identities who have both been harassed by others and been accused of harassing others in social VR, we unpack how people justify and reflect on their behavior given their prior experiences of both being victims of harassment and being called a harasser. We thus offer unique insights into the complexity of harassment in social VR by highlighting cases of "gray areas" and critical ethical implications in such harassment accusations, which are understudied in the existing literature. We also propose two high-level design principles for new strategies and approaches to foster safe social VR spaces based on people's unique experiences of both sides of harassment accusations in social VR.

Disclosure-based cyberbullying is defined as sharing personal information without consent, often with malicious intentions. This affects young adults and leads to long-term personal damage (i.e., career, reputation, and family). Current strategies on social media platforms fall short of addressing this problem. We engaged 20 young adults (18-34) through a participatory design approach in co-designing solutions that reflect their concerns, needs, and desires. Participants were divided into three groups based on their cyberbullying experience as victim, discloser, or attacker. Our participants designed 15 solutions for prevention, intervention, support, and awareness. These solutions reveal the need for privacy control, anonymity, and autonomy for victims, a restorative justice system, social media accountability, and the involvement of influencers and content creators in awareness and education. We provide implications for progressive and adaptive social media awareness campaigns, a compassionate justice system, and soft control of personal information ownership.

With the pervasive and evolving use of tracking and AI to make inferences about online platform users, it has become imperative for adolescents—a key demographic using such platforms—to develop a deep understanding of these practices to protect their privacy. Traditionally, K-12 cybersecurity education has largely been confined to extracurricular activities, limiting underrepresented students’ access. To resolve this shortcoming, we partnered with a rural-identifying middle school to deliver AI-related privacy education in classrooms. Using Design-Based Research methodology, we identified students’ AI-related privacy learning needs and developed six education modules. This paper focuses on the design, classroom implementation, and evaluation of module #2, covering the privacy threats of Tracking and Pervasive Personalization (TaPP). Student assessment outcomes show they developed transferable foundational knowledge of the privacy implications of tracking and personalization after participating in the TaPP module. Our findings demonstrate the benefits of integrating AI-related privacy education into existing K-12 curricula.

People often apply gender stereotypes toward computerized agents. Rather than challenging these stereotypes, modern AI technologies controversially use them in creating AI agents that underline stereotypical gendered roles. This approach thus further reinforces the often male-dominated societal gender norms and disenfranchises women and gender non-binary individuals. While this issue has raised concerns in the HCI and CSCW communities, still little is known regarding how to mitigate the negative impacts of embedding gender stereotypes in AI agents. In this paper, we propose an eXplainable AI (XAI) approach to mitigating individuals' gender stereotypes toward AI agents. We conducted an online video vignette experiment with 350 participants randomly assigned to one of the eighteen conditions of a 3 (gender of the agent: woman, man, gender-neutral) x 3 (task gender: feminine, masculine, neutral) x 2 (presence or absence of AI explanation) between-subjects design. Our findings indeed suggest that XAI helped participants avoid applying gender stereotypes toward gendered AI agents, by increasing their understanding of how the agent came to its decision and decreasing their rating of the agent's humanlikeness. We contribute to CSCW research by providing a timely investigation into individuals' gender stereotypes toward the state-of-the-art AI agents and by advancing the empirical understanding of the cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying these gender stereotypes. We also demonstrate how eXplainable AI can effectively suppress the application of social characteristics (i.e., gender stereotypes) toward AI agents by disrupting the said cognitive processes. Insights from this study can inform how future AI technologies should be designed to create a progressive gender reality that will gradually reshape humans' experience and ingrained gender ideologies.

Money is a sensitive and complex component of everyday life, which can significantly affect people's relationships with each other. Recently, emerging digital peer-to-peer (P2P) payment applications continue to complicate how people deal with money with individuals they know in comparison to traditional payment methods such as physical money (i.e., cash). Through an online survey study (N=218), in this paper, we investigate significant differences between using digital P2P payments and traditional payment methods (i.e., physical money) in terms of perceptions of transactions by using a given payment method, perceptions of people's existing interpersonal relationships with their known contacts after such transactions, and future use intention of a given payment method. We thus offer empirical evidence to highlight multidimensional influences of using digital P2P payments on established offline interpersonal relationships compared to using traditional payment methods (i.e., physical money). We also provide crucial new insights to unpack digital P2P payments as a novel technology-mediated interpersonal dynamic in people's everyday lives, which goes beyond merely as a business payment model or a financial service. We additionally provide important directions for designing more supportive and socially satisfactory digital P2P payment platforms in the future by taking the interplay of financial exchanges and interpersonal relationships into consideration.

The popularity of social virtual reality (VR) platforms such as VRChat has led to growing concerns about new and more severe forms of online harassment targeting one's identity characteristics (i.e., identity-based harassment ). Social VR users with marginalized identities (e.g., women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and racial/ethnic minorities) have been reported as particularly vulnerable to such harassment. This is mainly because social VR can make one's offline identity known to others (i.e., what we term identity revelation in this work) through a unique combination of avatar design, voice use, and immersive full- or partial-body tracking. To address these safety concerns, there is an urgent need to unpack the complex dynamics surrounding how one's offline identity is (mis)perceived by others, and how these (mis)perceptions may affect identity-based harassment in social VR. This study thus utilizes a large-scale survey with 223 social VR users across six continents/regions of the world with varying social VR experiences and identities to investigate (1) the relationship between identity-based harassment in social VR and (mis)perceptions of selective identity revelation practices, (2) how embodying one's identity in social VR might actually be less risky than once thought, and (3) how who you are does still matter when it comes to identity-based harassment in social VR. It also highlights the need to better account for understudied aspects of identity-based harassment in social VR and to better educate social VR users on the interplay between harassment and (mis)perceived identity revelation in these spaces.

Non-profit driven indie game development represents a growing open and participatory game production model as an alternative to the traditional mainstream gaming industry. However, this community is also facing and coping with tensions and dilemmas brought by its focus on artistic and cultural values over economic benefits. Using 28 interviews with indie game developers with a non-profit agenda across various cultures, we investigate the challenges non-profit driven indie game developers face, which mainly emerge in their personal or collaborative labor and their endeavors to secure sustainable resources and produce quality products. Our investigation extends the current HCI knowledge of the democratization of technology and its impact on the trajectory of innovating, designing, and producing future (gaming) technologies. These insights may help increase the opportunities for and retention of previously underrepresented groups in technology production and inform effective decision/policy making to better support the creativity industry in the future.

Although social support can be a vital component of gender and sexual identity formation, many LGBTQ+ individuals often lack offline social networks for such support. Traditional online technologies also reveal several challenges in providing LGBTQ+ individuals with effective social support. Therefore, social VR, as a unique online space for immersive and embodied experiences, is becoming popular within LGBTQ+ communities for supportive online interactions. Drawing on 29 LGBTQ+ social VR users’ experiences, we investigate the types of social support LGBTQ+ users have experienced through social VR and how they leverage unique social VR features to experience such support. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR innovates traditional online support mechanisms to empower LGBTQ+ individuals but leads to new safety and equality concerns. We also propose important principles for rethinking social VR design to provide all users, rather than just the privileged few, with supportive experiences.

Extensive HCI research has investigated how to prevent and mitigate harassment in virtual spaces, particularly by leveraging human-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based moderation. However, social Virtual Reality (VR) constitutes a novel social space that faces both intensified harassment challenges and a lack of consensus on how moderation should be approached to address such harassment. Drawing on 39 interviews with social VR users with diverse backgrounds, we investigate the perceived opportunities and limitations for leveraging AI-based moderation to address emergent harassment in social VR, and how future AI moderators can be designed to enhance such opportunities and address limitations. We provide the first empirical investigation into re-envisioning AI’s new roles in innovating content moderation approaches to better combat harassment in social VR. We also highlight important principles for designing future AI-based moderation incorporating user-human-AI collaboration to achieve safer and more nuanced online spaces.

Online harassment against women - particularly in gaming and virtual worlds contexts - remains a salient and pervasive issue, and arguably reflects the systems of offline structural oppression to control women's bodies and rights in today's world. Harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) is also a growing new frontier of research in HCI and CSCW, particularly focusing on marginalized users such as women. Based on interviews with 31 women users of social VR, our findings present women's experiences of harassment risks in social VR as compared to harassment targeting women in pre-existing, on-screen online gaming and virtual worlds, along with strategies women employ to manage harassment in social VR with varying degrees of success. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on harassment in social VR by highlighting how women's marginalization online and offline impact their perceptions of and strategies to mitigate harassment in this unique space. It also provides a critical reflection on women's mitigation strategies and proposes important implications to rethink social VR design to better prevent harassment against women and other marginalized communities in the future metaverse.

As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as "boundaries," (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as "boundary setting," and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as "boundary violations" in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users.

This paper explores the role of live streaming in distributed collaborative software development using indie game development, an end-user driven creative community, as an example. We conducted 27 in-depth interviews with indie game developers from various cultures and countries, who had engaged in live streaming for collaborative software development either as a streamer or a viewer. Our findings show how live streaming can be used by indie game developers to support their endeavors to innovate the traditional game development model, which goes beyond just learning and teaching technical skills. We also highlight the potential challenges indie developers face in this process. We thus make unique contributions to CSCW by bridging the previously often disconnected research agendas on collaborative software development and live streaming. We also provide potential directions for designing future live streaming platforms to better support distributed collaboration in emerging end-user driven creative activities.

Esports commentating, the practice of reporting, explaining, and elaborating live competitive gameplay to spectators, is a centerpiece of esports as a rapidly growing spectator sport and an essential component of today's growing gaming/live streaming ecosystem. In particular, esports commentators face three unique challenges: the preparation for conducting real time commentating on highly dynamic esports games; the complexity of in-the-moment decisions during the game's broadcast; and the balance between personal self-presentation and professional content presentation. Yet this emerging and novel sociotechnical practice and how these challenges affect esports commentators' live performance and self-presentation practices has received relatively little research attention in HCI and CSCW. In this paper, we endeavor to address these limitations by empirically analyzing 19 esports commentators' sociotechnical practices. Our findings highlight the complex interaction dynamics involved in esports commentating as well as the importance of professionalism and social presence in esports commentators' self-presentation. In order to execute seamless and spontaneous commentary, commentators must be studious and engage in much prior research and have a clear sense of self. We contribute to the growing CSCW literature on esports commentating practices by revealing esports commentators' unique decision making process presenting information and their self-image.