AI Phenomenology for Understanding Human-AI Experiences Across Eras

There is no 'ordinary' when it comes to AI. The human-AI experience is extraordinarily complex and specific to each person, yet dominant measures such as usability scales and engagement metrics flatten away nuance. We argue for AI phenomenology: a research stance that asks "How did it feel?" beyond the standard questions of "How well did it perform?" when interacting with AI systems. AI phenomenology acts as a paradigm for bidirectional human-AI alignment as it foregrounds users' first-person perceptions and interpretations of AI systems over time. We motivate AI phenomenology as a framework that captures how alignment is experienced, negotiated, and updated between users and AI systems. Tracing a lineage from Husserl through postphenomenology to Actor-Network Theory, and grounding our argument in three studies-two longitudinal studies with "Day", an AI companion, and a multi-method study of agentic AI in software engineering-we contribute a set of replicable methodological toolkits for conducting AI phenomenology research: instruments for capturing lived experience across personal and professional contexts, three design concepts (translucent design, agency-aware value alignment, temporal co-evolution tracking), and a concrete research agenda. We offer this toolkit not as a new paradigm but as a practical scaffold that researchers can adapt as AI systems-and the humans who live alongside them-continue to co-evolve.

AI and My Values: User Perceptions of LLMs' Ability to Extract, Embody, and Explain Human Values from Casual Conversations

Does AI understand human values? While this remains an open philosophical question, we take a pragmatic stance by introducing VAPT, the Value-Alignment Perception Toolkit, for studying how LLMs reflect people's values and how people judge those reflections. 20 participants texted a human-like chatbot over a month, then completed a 2-hour interview with our toolkit evaluating AI's ability to extract (pull details regarding), embody (make decisions guided by), and explain (provide proof of) human values. 13 participants left our study convinced that AI can understand human values. Participants found the experience insightful for self-reflection and found themselves getting persuaded by the AI's reasoning. Thus, we warn about "weaponized empathy": a potentially dangerous design pattern that may arise in value-aligned, yet welfare-misaligned AI. VAPT offers concrete artifacts and design implications to evaluate and responsibly build value-aligned conversational agents with transparency, consent, and safeguards as AI grows more capable and human-like into the future.