Collaborative Research: HCC: Understanding the Wide-scale Impact of Generative AI on Online Communities

Online communities are essential for social support, knowledge creation, creativity, and other social goods. However, the rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools poses challenges to these vital social structures. GenAI’s ability to generate human-quality text, images, and videos is changing how content is created and consumed online in ways that could disrupt online communities. This project will study the impact GenAI might have on creation of content and participation in online communities; on the practice and effectiveness of community governance; on how people evaluate content posted to online communities; and on the effects on outcomes for both community members and the community as a whole. These findings will suggest potential improvements for both the design and governance of online communities and AI systems, both technologies of significant social importance. This project will consider these aspects -- the shifts in participation, governance, evaluation, and outcomes -- as a framework to study GenAI's effect on online communities and our society. The project team will assess these questions by studying several widely-used online community platforms with a range of platform designs and community goals, in order to create generalizable insights about the impact of GenAI on online communities. For each site, the project will follow research questions aligned with the framework, using multiple methods and techniques, from qualitative semi-structured interviews of participants and community leaders to quantitative methods like interrupted time series analysis of communities’ activity logs. Because robust detection and identification of AI-generated content will likely remain an unsolved problem, the project will use other techniques such as temporal analysis, community responses, and expert judgments by community leaders as key indicators of the presence of AI-generated content. Taken together, this research aims to inform and transform our understanding of GenAI in online communities, leading to advancement in numerous academic fields while informing the design and governance of these new technologies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.