Interrogating AI: Characterizing Emergent Playful Interactions with ChatGPT

In an era of AI's growing capabilities and influences, recent advancements are constantly reshaping HCI and CSCW's view of AI. Playful interactions with AI systems naturally emerged as an important way for users to make sense of the ever-changing technology. However, these emergent and playful interactions are underexamined. We target this gap by investigating playful interactions exhibited by users of an emerging AI technology, ChatGPT. Through a thematic analysis of 372 user-generated posts on the ChatGPT subreddit, we found that more than half of user discourse revolves around playful interactions. The analysis further allowed us to construct a preliminary framework to describe these interactions, categorizing them into six types: reflecting, jesting, imitating, challenging, tricking, and contriving; each included sub-categories. This study contributes to the field of HCI and CSCW by illuminating the multifaceted nature of playful interactions with AI, underlining their significance in helping users assess AI agency, shaping the human-AI relationship, and offering rich implications to AI system design.