AI coding assistants are generating substantial portions of code, fundamentally challenging traditional notions of authorship and ownership in software development. We conducted a within-subjects experiment examining three AI coding assistant autonomy conditions—High (AI generates complete code), Medium (AI provides substantial suggestions), and Low (AI offers minimal assistance). We found that AI autonomy systematically reshaped developers’ psychological relationships with code through distinct patterns across ownership dimensions. Possession decreased continuously with each increase in AI contribution. Identity remained similar under Low and Medium autonomy but decreased substantially under High autonomy. Responsibility decreased from Low to Medium and High autonomy, though developers maintained some sense of responsibility across all conditions. Attribution patterns revealed symmetric bidirectional shifts where ownership and responsibility attribution moved from predominantly Human-centered under Low autonomy through balanced uncertainty at Medium autonomy to predominantly AI-centered under High autonomy. Despite these internal psychological shifts, professional disclosure practices showed striking stability. While developers became less comfortable claiming ownership to technical reviewers as AI contribution increased, their willingness to describe creation processes transparently and accept accountability for production systems remained consistent across all conditions. These findings illuminate how AI autonomy fundamentally restructures the psychological landscape of human-AI co-creation while developers preserve core professional obligations for transparency and accountability.

Studies of data collection in the workplace or educational environments have highlighted concerns around privacy, autonomy, and negative performance impacts of unmitigated data surveillance. However, key differences in the perspectives of that surveillance by workers and students have shown that while workers are reticent to the increasing workforce surveillance, students tend to not be concerned due to the perceived or assumed beneficence of educational institutions. In the following study, we look at a population at the intersection of workers and students: surgical residents. Like many health-professional trainees, this population is training on-the-job and there is an increasing number and forms of data collection systems being deployed as a part of that training in the name of performance improvement, feedback, and assessment. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 surgical residents enrolled in 7 general surgery programs in the United States to investigate their privacy perceptions to determine how they may differ from those that are solely workers or students. Our findings reveal that they are unaware of how their data is shared and are concerned about data misrepresentation, fear of misuse affecting job security, and potential discrimination, but at the same time are trusting their educators to have access to their data to provide better training outcomes. Through this empirical evidence, we highlight how medical trainees have competing needs for data privacy and use compared to those who are solely workers or students. To this end, we provide initial recommendations to address privacy concerns, correct misunderstandings about data use, and promote the adoption of privacy-aware practices in health professional training.

Social Virtual Reality (VR) is emerging as a promising technology for individuals with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).However, we still need to explore how practitioners perceive and envision its integration into their clinical practice.This study presents findings from semi-structured interviews with six practitioners (clinicians, therapists, and clinical professors) experienced in ADHD and VR interventions.Our findings reveal practitioners see significant therapeutic potential in social VR for supporting cognitive skills, impulse control, and creating emotionally safe environments.However, they also highlight challenges, including difficulties with social communication in VR, ensuring skill transfer to real-life, and managing overstimulation.

Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) online has become a major safety issue for children to access the Internet. To combat CSEA, electronics services providers (ESP) have implemented various mechanisms to detect child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). However, these mechanisms, despite their capability to prevent the mass distribution of CSAM online, may raise significant privacy concerns among general users. In this paper, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 23 participants to understand their privacy perceptions of two types of online CSAM detection mechanisms. Our results suggested that users were concerned about the transparency of the detection process, inappropriate access to users' data, and unclear boundaries of such mechanisms. Our results also highlight that, even though the majority of participants choose to sacrifice their privacy for societal benefits, they still have privacy concerns that need to be addressed. We discuss the design and policy implications for ESP to improve users' awareness of the data practices of these mechanisms, alleviate users' privacy concerns, and increase societal benefits.

People with disabilities (PWD) have shown a growing presence in the emerging social virtual reality (VR). To support disability representation, some social VR platforms start to involve disability features in avatar design. However, it is unclear how disability disclosure via avatars (and the way to present it) would affect PWD’s social experiences and interaction dynamics with others. To fill this gap, we conducted a diary study with 10 PWD who freely explored VRChat—a popular commercial social VR platform—for two weeks, comparing their experiences between using regular avatars and avatars with disability signifiers (i.e., avatar features that indicate the user’s disability in real life). We found that PWD preferred using avatars with disability signifiers and wanted to further enhance their aesthetics and interactivity. However, such avatars also caused embodied, explicit harassment targeting PWD. We revealed the unique factors that led to such harassment and derived design implications and protection mechanisms to inspire more safe and inclusive social VR.

In social Virtual Reality (VR), users are embodied in avatars and interact with other users in a face-to-face manner using avatars as the medium. With the advent of social VR, people with disabilities (PWD) have shown an increasing presence on this new social media. With their unique disability identity, it is not clear how PWD perceive their avatars and whether and how they prefer to disclose their disability when presenting themselves in social VR. We fill this gap by exploring PWD’s avatar perception and disability disclosure preferences in social VR. Our study involved two steps. We first conducted a systematic review of fifteen popular social VR applications to evaluate their avatar diversity and accessibility support. We then conducted an in-depth interview study with 19 participants who had different disabilities to understand their avatar experiences. Our research revealed a number of disability disclosure preferences and strategies adopted by PWD (e.g., reflect selective disabilities, present a capable self). We also identified several challenges faced by PWD during their avatar customization process. We discuss the design implications to promote avatar accessibility and diversity for future social VR platforms.