alt.britchi: Between The Cracks lightning talks
Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 17:20–17:30
Add this session to your calendar. Talks run back-to-back in the order below.
| Order | Presentation | Abstract | Authors | Contribution type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Typecast: Who Do We Think Wrote This? | Positionality statements ask authors to explain how identity, experience and social position shape research. Yet readers already form views about authors from their papers. Typecast reverses the statement. A participant submits academic writing to a website, records what they expect a reader to infer from it, and receives a model-generated profile of the author. The profile also suggests where the work may or may not belong. Participants respond to each claim using five labels: correct, incorrect, uncomfortable, unknowable and none of your business. Some claims may be accurate; others may be implausible or harmful while retaining something recognisable. Typecast uses this mix of recognition and error to examine the assumptions readers and models bring to a paper. The exercise measures nothing. Its interest is in what happens once an inferred author enters the judgment of the work, which occurs whether or not anyone intends it. As artificial intelligence enters scholarly review, the project asks who a system thinks wrote a paper and how that imagined author may shape its reading. | Snow, Gouliev, Barry | alt.britchi |
| 2 | Yve Smith is human and can make mistakes, including about AI. | This paper is a provocation and, as such, is vulnerable to rigorous academic scrutiny. It presents a series of speculative LLM disclaimers as a potential avenue for experientially altering users’ understandings of LLM systems, but these are not intended for real-world use. Disclaimers are a narrowly bounded example of such experiential interventions and should not be considered a complete solution. Claims made in this paper about the irrelevance of anthropomorphism, the implications of language as a mode of interface, and the flattening of embodied experience into text remain open to dispute, and may be unfounded, incomplete or misleading. Reading this paper may cause confusion, irritation, amusement, uncertainty or fatigue. Please exercise caution and consult reliable corroborating sources before taking any action following the reading of this paper. | Smith | alt.britchi |
| 3 | Mollified by Mundane Machines: GenAI and the rise of Authorship Psychosis | “Whatever your name is, get ready for a big surprise: you are not you, you're me" (Hauser, Total Recall). Generative AI (genAI) has arrived to great fanfare and world-changing promises. Yet technological disruption is not new. From email in healthcare to eCommerce reshaping the high street, each has been normalised into mundanity. We argue genAI will follow this same march into the quotidian, while hiding an insidious challenge. One that HCI's augmentation paradigm cannot see. A challenge not to professions or marketplaces, but to selfhood and identity. In our work on responsible AI, we have seen practitioners grieving lost craft, observed skillsets become economically redundant and heard claims of "responsible use" from those circulating documents containing hallucinations. More worryingly, we see AI-slop being mistaken for authentic thought, which we call authorship psychosis. We end with a plea: as another profound technology disappears, let it not take our minds with it. | Dow, Colborn-Clark, Pointon | alt.britchi |
| 4 | Ted-AI Talks: Challenging Chats with AI-Enabled Teddies | People are increasingly turning to AI agents for advice and support, but can, as a result, be misled or develop an over-reliance upon a single AI voice. In this paper we offer a provocation that takes a playful approach to multi-agent conversations, where our embodied AI agents, each with their own unique characteristics and preferences, offer diverse opinions in a social discourse setting. Such a multi-agent approach stimulates critical thinking and moves us away from a simplistic assumption that the AI agent is always right. | Briggs, Wood, Jackson, Montague | alt.britchi |
| 5 | Playful and Forgiving Relationship with Smartphones: A First-Person Story of Academic Labour and Digital Dependency | Smartphones are portable, always present, and facilitate persistent connections with people, information, and work. They transformed how we live and work, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional life. HCI academics are uniquely positioned as both creators and consumers of these technologies, contributing to an 'always-with', 'always-on', and 'always-connected’ culture that can obscure their relationship to technology and academic labour. Although universities provide guidance on ‘digital health’ and work-life balance, contemporary academic smartphone use remains underexplored—this alt.britchi paper presents an autoethnographic account of a contemporary HCI researcher focusing on flexible working, FoMU (not FoMO), and forgiving intentions. It then invites the alt.britchi community to reflect on their smartphone battery—the question is not how long your phone lasts, but how long yours does— and how many recharge cycles you have left. | Lewis | alt.britchi |
| 6 | Guarded Hope: Opportunities and challenges in using interactive and AI-assisted filmmaking in educational research in South Africa | This paper is not from a study in Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) but emerged as having relevance to HCI discourses because of the integration of interactive computer technology with educational research activities and aims around social and environmental justice. Extending conventional discourses on HCI, this paper focuses on relationships of power, place, and participation to story-making and sharing technologies, and how this informs the social impact that technology can make. The paper conceives of a ‘Guarded Hope’ around tensions in a case study using interactive and AI-assisted filmmaking in participatory research with underrepresented Xhosa girls living in low-resource contexts in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa, to explore the risks they face collecting water, and the points of resiliency they draw on in their communities to navigate those risks. With the aim of moving towards hopefulness and overcoming guardedness, this paper offers recommendations to address some of the challenges identified. | Van Borek | alt.britchi |
| 7 | On the Power of Being Understood: Love, Strife, and the Boundaries of Relational Intelligence | On the Power of Being Understood examines interpersonal legibility as a form of relational power through two speculative artworks: an interactive fictional archive, The Invisible Mask - S59, and a speculative short film, The Vanishing Star - Venus. Both works examine technologies designed to infer emotions, memories, vulnerabilities, and unspoken needs. Drawing on Empedocles’ cosmological forces of Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos), I use love and strife as a conceptual lens for analysing the connective and divisive capacities of relational AI. At a systemic scale, S59 imagines a civilisation where technologies turn interpersonal transparency into social control. At an intimate scale, Venus traces a relationship between a socially isolated person and an artificial companion capable of recognising vulnerabilities overlooked by human society. Rather than advocating total legibility or absolute technological refusal, this paper offers two speculative design provocations: protected ambiguity, the active preservation of human opacity against structural surveillance, and relational intelligence as dual presence, a critical lens through which we navigate the co-existence of genuine emotional solace and systemic manipulation, exploring how AI can remain alongside human life without capturing it. | Xiao | alt.britchi |