Re-imagining AI-Human Relationships in World-Building Contexts through Everyday Movement

• In Event: Speculative Futures with and Against AI: Youth Worldbuilding as Sociotechnical Intervention

Abstract

Statement of Purpose We describe our co-design efforts with youth to envision expansive human-AI roles for generative language models (GAI) within world-building contexts, through a collective exploration of GAI and everyday forms of movement. Technologists have advanced GAI-based proposals that purport to revolutionize the collective process of world-building by using GAI to derive new worlds from human-provided constraints (Tao & Vyas, 2025; Lin & Long, 2023). Youth participation is often limited to providing binary feedback on the helpfulness or unhelpfulness of tools (Bai et al., 2022). There is an urgent need to create spaces where young people bring their expertise to complicate such binaries, spaces that forefront dimensions of intelligence that are most human rather than the affordances of GAI. Here, we ask: how do collective explorations of everyday movement and GAI support youth in negotiating relationships of being, knowing, acting, and valuing between GAI and humans in the work of world-building?

Theoretical Framework We understand both everyday movement and GAI as mediums that can help inspire possibilities that may not emerge from individual/analytic processes. Many already use GAI to help spur new ideas for its users (Gruner & Csikszentmihalyi, 2019). For movement, the learning sciences has understood movement as constituted by prior social, institutionalized relations (Vossoughi et al., 2020; Gordon, 2008). Sheets-Johnstone (1981) argues that these relations are not always able to be surfaced analytically; instead, thinking often surfaces through movement. These mediums, in interanimation, can provoke new subject-subject relationships (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) that might not be immediately conjured through individual and analytical processes, serving as springboards to envision new human-AI relationships.

Method and Data We draw from video data from a 2025 two-day workshop that brought together movement educators and seven youth participants. As a research team, we collectively watched the recorded data, created content logs, and created transcripts about the data (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). We thematically coded for moments where students constructed their own role vs. the role of GAI in world-building.

Results Our workshop was grounded in a writing activity where we wrote letters to loved ones about issues on which we disagreed with them. Youth participants initially used GAI to create the letters. They declared that the letters could be delivered as they were, provided they could control how the letter was delivered by altering tone or punctuation. Empathy-based movement activities (students take turns to mirror the spontaneous movements of other students) later complicated these initial relationships. Participants complicated their initial stance by then framing GAI as an “empathetic” tool, one that learns from a users’ disposition, which is then “mirrored onto you.” Youth participants conceptualized GAI as a tool that helped people understand their personal feelings towards another person.

Scholarly significance Recent work in literacy has argued that GAI advancements require nurturing literacies that emerge from embodied intelligence (Bradley et al., 2024). We demonstrate how improvisational movement can support youth participants to center on more human elements when considering new uses of GAI in world-building.

Authors

• Michael Alan Chang, Boston University

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Gia Kim, Boston University

• Heila Precel, Boston University