Recent advances in AI are integrating AI into the fabric of human social life, creating transformative, co-shaping relationships between humans and AI. This trend makes it urgent to investigate how these systems, in turn, shape their users. We conducted a three-phase design study with 24 participants to explore this dynamic. Our findings reveal critical tensions: (1) social AI often exacerbates the very interpersonal problems it is designed to mitigate; (2) it introduces nuanced privacy harms for secondary users inadvertently involved in AI-mediated social interactions; and (3) it can threaten the primary user's personal agency and identity. We argue these tensions expose a problematic tendency in the user-centered paradigm, which often prioritizes immediate user experience at the expense of core human values like interpersonal ethics and self-efficacy. We call for a paradigm shift toward a more provocative and relational design perspective that foregrounds long-term social and personal consequences.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems