"It Felt a Bit Eerie": Exploring Humanlike Interactions During Collaborative Writing with an Artificial Agent
For HCI researchers and designers of human-AI collaboration systems, this work reveals trade-offs between humanlike interaction and social costs, offering design implications and ethical considerations.
This study explores how temporal and visual interaction design in AI-assisted writing tools affects social connection and user experience. Results show synchronous suggestions improve efficiency but cause misalignment, while a visual cursor enhances intent understanding but induces surveillance feelings.
While human-AI collaboration systems have increasingly been built to increase efficiency or support creativity, little work has examined how the design of interactions shapes the social connection between human and artificial agent. We examine how the temporal and visual dimensions of collaboration shape the experience of a writing task. Specifically, we built three variants of an AI-assisted text editor along a spectrum of simulated humanlike interaction (synchronous and with a cursor) to machinelike interaction (asynchronous and without a cursor), and conducted a comparative user study (n=48). Our exploratory findings suggest that synchronous suggestions increased efficiency but led to contextual misalignment, while a visual cursor increased intent understanding but evoked feelings of surveillance. Taken together, humanlike design of artificial agents can create positive social expectations but also elicit social costs, especially without the alignment present in human-human collaboration. We extend our findings into design implications and ethical considerations when building human-AI collaboration systems.