Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Online Communities: A Socio-Technical Perspective

While online communities such as Stack Overflow or Reddit are important virtual spaces, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought disruptive challenges to online communities. Among them are concerns for reduced content quality, community engagement, and the lack of ethical safeguards. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study of four prominent online communities in the U.S. and China to examine the impacts of AI adoption on the dynamics in online communities. Using the socio-technical system and legitimacy theory as the analytical lens, our findings reveal two patterns: (1) In the U.S. online communities, tensions often involve structure-people dynamics, while in the Chinese online communities, tensions come from the people-technology-task dynamics; and (2) In the U.S. online communities, AI adoptions often suffer from the lack of moral legitimacy, while in the Chinese online communities, there is often a lack of cognitive legitimacy. We attribute these patterns to the different cultural values and technological maturity across the two countries.