Playful Exploration: How users tame ‘the wild’ in recent Generative AIs

A recent upsurge in generative AI applications (GAI) suggests a significant shift in the public orientation of AI, which has entered most domains of life; from education; to medicine; to graphic design and art; to philosophy and science. Laypersons have also embraced GAIs such as ChatGPT and Midjourney and commenced experimenting, appropriating, and playing with them in various ways.

For example, users deploy ChatGPT for mundane tasks like writing job applications; sending party declines; and finding dinner recipes. These and many other user practices are rapidly developing in these early stages of GAI and is part of a taming process of a new and “wild” technology. To understand the impact of AI on culture and communication at large, research must address how users are taming, appropriating, and domesticating new available AI platforms. Doing so provides insight into emerging everyday practices and values with AI and help theorize processes of technology adoption.

Adopting a domestication theory framework and an online ethnography approach for data collection, we explore appropriations of GAI that highlight users’ active sense-making practices and agency. Focussing on ‘playful encounters’ in the intersection of “craft consumption” and digital play, we highlight the experimental nature of users’ practices and shift focus from “telic” and goal-oriented activities to discuss the cultural impact of GAI on communication.