Han Zheng

The rapid adoption of generative AI (GenAI) has intensified public discourse on its risks and benefits. However, research remains limited on how users perceive these risks and benefits across varying psychological distances and how they balance these perceptions in their adoption decisions. Drawing on construal level theory and regulatory focus theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with GenAI users (N = 30). Findings reveal that users perceive GenAI's risks and benefits across proximal and distal dimensions concurrently. In their adoption decisions, they demonstrate either promotion-focused orientations (i.e. risk downplaying and strength prioritization) to emphasize GenAI's benefits or prevention-focused orientations (i.e. privacy protection, output scrutinization, and reliance abstinence) to mitigate its risks. This study provides theoretical and practical implications for AI adoption and risk communication, contributing to a deeper understanding of how users navigate the complexities of emerging AI technologies.

In correlated electron materials, electrons often self-organize and form a variety of patterns with potential ordering of charges, spins, and orbitals, which are believed to be closely connected to many novel properties of these materials including superconductivity, metal-insulator transitions, and the CMR effect. How these real-space patterns affect the conductivity and other properties of materials is one of the major challenges of modern condensed matter physics. Moreover, although the presence of static stripes is indisputable, the existence of fluctuating stripes in such compounds is a subject of great debate. Here we present the electronic excitations of La$_{2-2x}$Sr$_{1+2x}$Mn$_{2}$O$_{7}$ probed by angle-resolved photoemission, from which we demonstrate that a novel type of ordering, termed bi-stripes, can exhibit either static or fluctuating order as a function of temperature. We found that the static bi-stripe order is especially damaging to electrical conductivity, completely localizing the electrons in the bi-stripe regions, while the fluctuating stripes can coexist with mobile carriers. This physics drives a novel phase transition with colossal conductivity changes as a function of temperature. Our finding suggests that quantum stripes can give rise to electronic properties significantly different from their static counterparts. Inducing transition between them can turn on remarkable electronic phenomena, enriching our understanding of correlated electron systems as well as opening a window for potential applications in electronic devices.