Interrogating AI: Characterizing Emergent Playful Interactions with ChatGPT
This work addresses how users understand and relate to AI through playful interactions, providing insights for HCI and CSCW design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research in human-AI interaction.
The study tackled the underexamined problem of playful interactions with AI by analyzing user discourse on ChatGPT, finding that 54% of posts involved playful interactions and developing a framework with six categories to describe them.
In an era of AI's growing capabilities and influences, recent advancements are reshaping HCI and CSCW's view of AI. Playful interactions emerged as an important way for users to make sense of the ever-changing AI technologies, yet remained underexamined. We target this gap by investigating playful interactions exhibited by users of a popular AI technology, ChatGPT. Through a thematic analysis of 372 user-generated posts on the ChatGPT subreddit, we found that more than half (54\%) of user discourse revolved around playful interactions. The analysis further allowed us to construct a preliminary framework to describe these interactions, categorizing them into six types: reflecting, jesting, imitating, challenging, tricking, and contriving; each included sub-categories. This study contributes to HCI and CSCW by identifying the diverse ways users engage in playful interactions with AI. It examines how these interactions can help users understand AI's agency, shape human-AI relationships, and provide insights for designing AI systems.