Tracing conceptual development in human-AI collaboration
I wonder if we're missing a vocabulary for describing how ideas develop across distributed systems of people, artifacts, and increasingly AI. Authorship and acknowledgments don't really fit as descriptions of conceptual development.
I legitimately don’t care if we call AI creative or not, or honestly, even if it should receive credit for ideas. Those are probably important conversations for someone else to follow. I’m much more interested in how ideas develop and how we describe that development.
Often academia tends to tell linear stories about emerging ideas. First, cite the literature that influenced us, then acknowledge colleagues who provided feedback, and then describe some contribution as though it emerged following one phase to the next.
Maybe not for everyone, but for me that has never really captured the entirety of it.
Sarah’s idea development process: do something, notice something, question something, have conversations about something, draft something, abandon that draft of something, reread literature, meet with advisors, draft three other beginnings of articles, incorporate conference questions, notice something else, take a few months for unknown reasons, sketch-out ideas that I hopefully remember, wake up to realize those scattered pieces were different views of the same idea. So what can sometimes look like a sudden insight emerges from months or years of slow conceptual accumulation.
This is compounded with the introduction of human-AI collaboration. There’s not another author suddenly. It doesn’t make intellectual development distributed. It makes visible something that was probably true all along: ideas develop across people, literature, convesations, artifacts, and now AI.
In my experience, AI doesn’t often contribute a finished idea. It will organize, ask questions, provide language, and surface inconsistencies. These are challenges to my established thinking and createsproductive friction that expands my thinking. It’s not authorship. But it’s also not nothing. How do we name that? Dismissing human-AI interaction as part of the process also risks dismissing genuine contributions.
Occasionally, it will introduce a perspective that sends me in an entirely new direction, but even then, that suggestion only becomes meaningful because it encounters an existing network of experiences, readings, conversations, and partially formed thoughts. The intellectual work isn’t the appearance of the suggestion. It’s evaluating whether that suggestion belongs within an already developing conceptual system.
One reason I started writing/recording these research notes is that they help make my development of concepts observable. I’m trying to preserve the trajectory of these ideas. Ten iterations from now, I might disagree with parts of this note, but that’s kind of the point. When you’re studying process, the evolution is part of the contribution. I’m not trying to establish ownership or prove novelty (I mean, I’m not trying too hard to establish ownership or prove novelty), but I’m much more interested in making conceptual evolution visible.
These notes are meant to capture transitions where a question changes shape, connections align, assumptions fall apart, new concepts are adopted, and ideas emerge and are refined.
There are arguments for or against calling AI a thinking partner. I do suspect that whatever we call these interactions will make trajectory just as important as documenting outcomes.
I don’t have a framework for this yet. Something, something… “Sarah, you can look into that AFTER YOU FINISH YOUR DISSERTATION!”But I do think there’s an opportunity to rethink how we describe the development of coherent ideas in distributed cognitive systems.
Some questions I kick around:
What counts as intellectual provenance in human-AI collaboration?
How do we distinguish authorship from cognitive support?
Should research preserve trajectories instead of only finished products? Is it already essentially doing this?
What evidence should matter when ideas emerge over months rather than moments?
Sarah, remember: this is allowed to be unfinished. If it were finished, it wouldn’t be a Research Note.
As always, these notes reflect my ownintellectual work. AI was used for organization and conceptual scaffolding,both as support of and as an object of iterative inquiry into the creativeprocess and cognition.