Negotiating the Shared Agency between Humans & AI in the Recommender System

Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized information dissemination, enhancing efficiency and reshaping content delivery across various domains. However, concerns about user agency have arisen due to the inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and the nature of one-way output (power asymmetry) on algorithms. While both issues have been criticized by scholars via advocating explainable AI (XAI) and human-AI collaborative decision-making (HACD), few research evaluates their integrated effects on users, and few HACD discussions in recommender systems beyond improving and filtering the results. This study proposes an incubating idea as a missing step in HACD that allows users to control the degrees of AI-recommended content. Then, we integrate it with existing XAI to a flow prototype aimed at assessing the enhancement of user agency. We seek to understand how types of agency impact user perception and experience, and bring empirical evidence to refine the guidelines and designs for human-AI interactive systems.