Mediating Community-AI Interaction through Situated Explanation: The Case of AI-Led Moderation
This work tackles the problem of making AI explanations accessible and relevant for communities, rather than just individuals, which is incremental in bridging XAI with HCI and CSCW fields.
The study addresses the gap in explainable AI (XAI) research by exploring how communities understand AI-led decisions, using AI-led moderation as a case study to theorize situated explanation based on shared values and practices.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become prevalent in our everyday technologies and impacts both individuals and communities. The explainable AI (XAI) scholarship has explored the philosophical nature of explanation and technical explanations, which are usually driven by experts in lab settings and can be challenging for laypersons to understand. In addition, existing XAI research tends to focus on the individual level. Little is known about how people understand and explain AI-led decisions in the community context. Drawing from XAI and activity theory, a foundational HCI theory, we theorize how explanation is situated in a community's shared values, norms, knowledge, and practices, and how situated explanation mediates community-AI interaction. We then present a case study of AI-led moderation, where community members collectively develop explanations of AI-led decisions, most of which are automated punishments. Lastly, we discuss the implications of this framework at the intersection of CSCW, HCI, and XAI.