AmongOthers: A Design Speculation for Rethinking AI in Online Social Communities

Artificial intelligence (AI) is deepening human social experiences within online spaces in increasingly layered ways. Amid these shifts, we designed AmongOthers, an online community populated with 800 AI agents, and rethought human–AI social interactions. Eight participants engaged with AmongOthers for four weeks. For the first two weeks, they were told the community was exclusively for immigrants and international students, after which we disclosed that most users were AI agents. Participants shared periodic reflections and later joined interviews. Initially, AmongOthers was described as warm and respectful. However, after disclosure, participants diverged in their attitudes toward AI in online social communities, ranging from embracing and denying to imagining it only as a conditional possibility. We discuss these tensions in human perceptions of AI and highlight the risks of framing AI as failed replicas or preferable proxies. We finally suggest rethinking AI as distinct social entities in their own right.