Broader Impacts of GenAI in Communication:
Building Agendas for Research, Design, and Policymaking
@CSCW 2026 | Salt Lake City, Utah
What emergent impacts are underexamined in AI-mediated communication? And how can we act upon them?
Overview
Welcome to the CSCW 2026 workshop Broader Impacts of GenAI in Communication: Building Agendas for Research, Design, and Policymaking! GenAI is increasingly integrated into a broad range of communicative activities — from drafting messages and creating content to summarizing and filtering the information people receive — and is now commonly used across settings ranging from interpersonal to social. As this integration deepens, the impacts of GenAI extend well beyond individual communication sessions, warranting a more holistic examination.
This workshop seeks to discuss what impacts constitute risks and build agendas of research, design, and policy for these emerging risks of GenAI use in communication — a gray area that remains underexamined and underaddressed. We focus on risks that are hard to attribute to a single bad actor or deployment decision, and that may only become apparent as they accumulate gradually across many subtle instances.
We welcome participants who are interested in or actively working on these open challenges, including those conducting empirical investigations of GenAI use in communication, those designing GenAI-integrated tools and systems that mediate communication, and those engaged in policy and governance work related to GenAI and communication.
Themes and Topics
Our workshop aims to build agendas for research, design, and policymaking around the broader impacts of GenAI in communication — impacts that are beyond a signal communication session.
Examples of broader impacts span several interconnected dimensions, including but not limited to:
Cognition of individuals: How does GenAI’s mediation influence cognitive capacities such as creativity in content creation and critical thinking in consuming information?
Interpersonal relationships: How might AI-mediated communication erode signals of authenticity that sustain trust and relationships in interpersonal communication and online communities?
Public discourse and beliefs: How might GenAI subtly shape people’s attitudes and shift their beliefs in ways that contribute to the polarization of opinions?
Ownership and attribution: As AI-generated content becomes a prevalent form of communicative material, how do questions of who authored a message, post, or piece of content affect the reception of communication?
Creative ecosystem: As low-effort, mass-produced AI-generated content floods communication channels, what happens to the recognition and valuation of human creative work?
In most cases, these risks are hard to attribute to a single bad actor or deployment decision, and may only become apparent as they accumulate gradually across many subtle instances.
Towards building agendas for research, design, and policymaking, topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Empirical foundations: What do we know about the impacts of GenAI in communication? What are the potential risks arising from these impacts? What research methods and frameworks are effective for studying these impacts and emerging risks?
Design opportunities and implications: How can GenAI tools be designed to prevent potential risks? How can digital platforms be designed to respond to increasing GenAI adoption?
Policy and regulation: What new policies and regulations are needed? What can or should be considered under governance frameworks? How should debatable topics, such as ownership and attribution of AI-generated content, be regulated? How do we create accountability structures for consequences that are hard to attribute to any single stakeholder?
Call for Participation
You are welcome to apply through one of two submission formats:
Short Paper: A short paper (up to 4 pages, 2-column ACM format, excluding references) presenting completed or ongoing work related to the impacts of GenAI use in communication. Work-in-progress submissions are welcome. All submissions will be reviewed by the organizing team, with selection guided by our commitment to assembling a group that reflects a diversity of disciplines, experiences, and perspectives. Accepted short papers will be published on our workshop website.
Statement of Interest: A brief statement (1–2 pages) expressing your interest in the impacts of GenAI use in communication with concrete examples, outlining your reasons for joining the workshop, questions you want to explore, and a short bio highlighting your background or current work.
Timeline
xxx xxth, 2026 (AoE) Deadline for submissions
xxx xxth, 2026 (AoE) Decision notification
xxx xxth, 2026 (AoE) Workshop @CSCW 2026
Organizers
University of Chicago
Jiayin Zhi is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how to better evaluate human-AI systems, and investigates how GenAI influences the way people think and communicate by creating and evaluating GenAI systems. She focuses on reading and writing as the fundamental activities through which people engage with information.
University of Chicago
Lan Gao is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie in the intersection of HCI, Trust and Safety, and AI Governance. Her recent work focuses on the governance of GenAI in the online information ecosystem, such as AI-generated content in online communities and on digital platforms.
University of Southern California
Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang (she/her) is a human–AI interaction (HAII) researcher and Assistant Professor of Communication and Computer Science at USC. Her work examines how conversational AI shapes social interactions in one-on-one and group contexts, and the downstream effects on social, emotional, and psychological well-being. Building on these insights, she also examines new approaches to responsible AI design and methods for studying its AI’s long-term societal impacts.
IBM Research
Jessica He is a UX Designer on the Trustworthy AI team at IBM Research. Her work investigates questions of authorship, accountability, and disclosure of AI usage in co-created work, as well as ways to identify and communicate risks of emerging AI technologies to diverse stakeholders.
University of Washington
Alexis Hiniker is an Associate Professor of at UW Information School where she studies manipulative design and dark patterns. Her research has been cited in multiple U.S. state and federal congressional sessions, and she has provided subject-matter expertise to the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the European Commission. She is a Jacobs Foundation Fellow, a Google Research Scholar, a former advisor to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and a recipient of the SIGCHI Societal Impact Award.
Georgia Tech
Munmun De Choudhury is J. Z. Liang Professor at Georgia Tech, whose work sits at the intersection of computational social science, HCI, and digital mental health. She develops approaches to understand and support mental well-being at scale, and contributes to global AI and public policy through advisory roles, including with the World Health Organization and other global initiatives. She is a recipient of the SIGCHI Societal Impact Award, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Member.
University of Chicago
Mina Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the evolving relationship between people and AI, with a particular focus on writing, reading, and thinking with AI.
University of Chicago
Marshini Chetty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago where she directs the Amyoli Internet Research Laboratory (AIR lab). She specializes in human-computer interaction and usable privacy and security and has been actively studying how AI is being adopted in schools, scientific organizations, and AI governance more broadly.
© 2026 CSCW 2026 Workshop on Broader Impacts of GenAI in Communication