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Beyond the Hype: Mapping Uncertainty and Gratification in AI Assistant Use
Karen Joy, Tawfiq Ammari, Alyssa Sheehan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09220 https:…

Beyond the Hype: Mapping Uncertainty and Gratification in AI Assistant Use
This paper examines the gap between the promises and real-world performance of emerging AI personal assistants. Drawing on interviews with early adopters of devices like Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin, as well as services like Ohai and Docus, we map user experiences through the lens of Uses and Gratifications and Uncertainty Reduction Theory. We identify three core types of user uncertainty, functional, interactional, and social, and explore how each disrupts different user gratifications. We show…