arXiv subjects

Romina Mahinpei

Publications and source records attributed to Romina Mahinpei.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

How Children Collaborate within Programmable AR Environments with Co-Located Collaborative Features

Programmable augmented reality (AR) environments are emerging as a promising way to support children's creative learning through embodied interaction with digital characters and physical space. At the same time, AR systems are increasingly capable of supporting co-located collaborative experiences. However, little is known about how children collaborate within programmable AR environments offering co-located collaborative features. In response, we extended Capybara, an existing programmable AR application for children, with co-located collaborative features supporting shared visibility and interaction across devices. We then conducted workshops with 9 children to examine whether and how collaboration emerges during use. Across our workshops, collaboration was often lightweight and implicit, emerging through three complementary forms: parallel play with social awareness, iterative remixing, and spontaneous peer support. Together, our findings provide insights for designing future child-centered programmable AR systems that better support co-located collaborative experiences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

AI Assistance for Discretionary Work: Increasing Feedback Provision in Higher Education

AI systems increasingly shape human workflows by generating intermediate artifacts that users can adopt, revise, or ignore. While prior work has shown that AI assistance can improve the efficiency and accuracy of required tasks, less is known about whether it can increase participation in discretionary but beneficial work that users often intend to perform but frequently skip. We study this question in the context of personalized feedback provision in higher education, a pedagogically valuable but often optional practice. We conduct a mixed-methods study combining a randomized field experiment and qualitative interviews in a 300-level machine learning course with n=11 teaching assistants (TAs) and n=88 students. Student submissions were randomly assigned to either (1) a treatment condition where TAs received AI-assisted feedback drafts after grading or (2) a control condition without drafts. TAs remained fully in control and could use, edit, or ignore drafts at their discretion. We find that AI-assisted feedback significantly increases feedback provision (+10.8 percentage points, SE=1.1, p<0.001) and feedback length (+39.8 chars, SE=3.45, p<0.001) without negatively affecting student usefulness ratings or reducing time per character. Qualitative findings suggest that AI-assisted drafts function as editable scaffolds that lower barriers to initiating feedback rather than reducing overall effort. Our findings highlight AI's promise for discretionary but beneficial tasks: increasing work that might otherwise go undone while preserving human control over final outcomes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

When LLMs Help -- and Hurt -- Teaching Assistants in Proof-Based Courses

Teaching assistants (TAs) are essential to grading and feedback provision in proof-based courses, yet these tasks are time-intensive and difficult to scale. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have been studied for grading and feedback, their effectiveness in proof-based courses is still unknown. Before designing LLM-based systems for this context, a necessary prerequisite is to understand whether LLMs can meaningfully assist TAs with grading and feedback. As such, we present a multi-part case study functioning as a technology probe in an undergraduate proof-based course. We compare rubric-based grading decisions made by an LLM and TAs with varying levels of expertise and examine TAs' perceptions of feedback generated by an LLM. We find substantial disagreement between LLMs and TAs on grading decisions but that LLM-generated feedback can still be useful to TAs for submissions with major errors. We conclude by discussing design implications for human-AI grading and feedback systems in proof-based courses.

cs.HC↗