English

When AI Becomes Routine: A Decade of Public AI Mediation in Korean Go Commentary

Computers and Society 2026-07-30 v1

Abstract

When AI systems surpass elite human performance and settle into everyday expert practice, the question that follows is how machine judgment is made publicly intelligible and attributable. We study Korean Go commentary on YouTube, where AI systems such as KataGo became standard analytic tools after AlphaGo. Our corpus spans a decade (2016--2025) and approximately 1,9001{,}900 hours of footage across institutional broadcasters and creator-led channels, in four phases of AI availability. We document a widening asymmetry between visual and verbal AI presence: AI winrate graphs are visible for about 98%98\% of late-period institutional broadcast time, yet AI-salient talk accounts for only 2.63%2.63\% of sentences. What recedes is the source label, not the metric: winrate and point-gap talk persists while ``AI'' itself goes unsaid. We read this recession as the communicative signature of domestication. Our strongest evidence is a compositional shift in verbal mediation: explicit naming gives way to interface rendering, and creator-led commentary leans further toward it than institutional commentary. We develop a typology distinguishing source-foregrounding from source-receding mediation, and argue that the two preserve different hooks of contestability: discursive anchors through which audiences can recognize and question the machine source. The stakes of that difference rise in domains where AI is less reliable than in Go.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.28332,
  title  = {When AI Becomes Routine: A Decade of Public AI Mediation in Korean Go Commentary},
  author = {Haewoon Kwak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28332},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at AIES 2026 (AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society). Extended version: the conference paper followed by Appendices A-I. 23 pages, 4 figures, 13 tables