The Collaboration Gap in Human-AI Work

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Vishwarupe, Varad, Jirotka, Marina, Shadbolt, Nigel, Flechais, Ivan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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_version_ 1866914491494563840
author Vishwarupe, Varad
Jirotka, Marina
Shadbolt, Nigel
Flechais, Ivan
author_facet Vishwarupe, Varad
Jirotka, Marina
Shadbolt, Nigel
Flechais, Ivan
contents LLMs are increasingly presented as collaborators in programming, design, writing, and analysis. Yet the practical experience of working with them often falls short of this promise. In many settings, users must diagnose misunderstandings, reconstruct missing assumptions, and repeatedly repair misaligned responses. This poster introduces a conceptual framework for understanding why such collaboration remains fragile. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 16 interviews with designers, developers, and applied AI practitioners working on LLM-enabled systems, and informed by literature on human-AI collaboration, we argue that stable collaboration depends not only on model capability but on the interaction's grounding conditions. We distinguish three recurrent structures of human-AI work: one-shot assistance, weak collaboration with asymmetric repair, and grounded collaboration. We propose that collaboration breaks down when the appearance of partnership outpaces the grounding capacity of the interaction and contribute a framework for discussing grounding, repair, and interaction structure in LLM-enabled work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18096
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Collaboration Gap in Human-AI Work
Vishwarupe, Varad
Jirotka, Marina
Shadbolt, Nigel
Flechais, Ivan
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
LLMs are increasingly presented as collaborators in programming, design, writing, and analysis. Yet the practical experience of working with them often falls short of this promise. In many settings, users must diagnose misunderstandings, reconstruct missing assumptions, and repeatedly repair misaligned responses. This poster introduces a conceptual framework for understanding why such collaboration remains fragile. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 16 interviews with designers, developers, and applied AI practitioners working on LLM-enabled systems, and informed by literature on human-AI collaboration, we argue that stable collaboration depends not only on model capability but on the interaction's grounding conditions. We distinguish three recurrent structures of human-AI work: one-shot assistance, weak collaboration with asymmetric repair, and grounded collaboration. We propose that collaboration breaks down when the appearance of partnership outpaces the grounding capacity of the interaction and contribute a framework for discussing grounding, repair, and interaction structure in LLM-enabled work.
title The Collaboration Gap in Human-AI Work
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18096