Who Owns the Text? Design Patterns for Preserving Authorship in AI-Assisted Writing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Bohan, Bu, Chengke, Dhillon, Paramveer S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Bohan
Bu, Chengke
Dhillon, Paramveer S.
author_facet Zhang, Bohan
Bu, Chengke
Dhillon, Paramveer S.
contents AI writing assistants can reduce effort and improve fluency, but they may also weaken writers' sense of authorship. We study this tension with an ownership-aware co-writing editor that offers on-demand, sentence-level suggestions and tests two common design choices: persona-based coaching and style personalization. In an online study (N=176), participants completed three professional writing tasks: an email without AI help, a proposal with generic AI suggestions, and a cover letter with persona-based coaching, while half received suggestions tailored to a brief sample of their prior writing. Across the two AI-assisted tasks, psychological ownership dropped relative to unassisted writing (about 0.85-1.0 points on a 7-point scale), even as cognitive load decreased (about 0.9 points) and quality ratings stayed broadly similar overall. Persona coaching did not prevent the ownership decline. Style personalization partially restored ownership (about +0.43) and increased AI incorporation in text (+5 percentage points). We distill five design patterns: on-demand initiation, micro-suggestions, voice anchoring, audience scaffolds, and point-of-decision provenance, to guide authorship-preserving writing tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_10236
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who Owns the Text? Design Patterns for Preserving Authorship in AI-Assisted Writing
Zhang, Bohan
Bu, Chengke
Dhillon, Paramveer S.
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
AI writing assistants can reduce effort and improve fluency, but they may also weaken writers' sense of authorship. We study this tension with an ownership-aware co-writing editor that offers on-demand, sentence-level suggestions and tests two common design choices: persona-based coaching and style personalization. In an online study (N=176), participants completed three professional writing tasks: an email without AI help, a proposal with generic AI suggestions, and a cover letter with persona-based coaching, while half received suggestions tailored to a brief sample of their prior writing. Across the two AI-assisted tasks, psychological ownership dropped relative to unassisted writing (about 0.85-1.0 points on a 7-point scale), even as cognitive load decreased (about 0.9 points) and quality ratings stayed broadly similar overall. Persona coaching did not prevent the ownership decline. Style personalization partially restored ownership (about +0.43) and increased AI incorporation in text (+5 percentage points). We distill five design patterns: on-demand initiation, micro-suggestions, voice anchoring, audience scaffolds, and point-of-decision provenance, to guide authorship-preserving writing tools.
title Who Owns the Text? Design Patterns for Preserving Authorship in AI-Assisted Writing
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10236