Digital Humanities, Social Science and Cultural Preservation
Human Attentiveness in AI-Assisted Academic Writing: A Process-Oriented Account of Co-Construction and Epistemic Stability
Abstract
To Phuoc Nguyen
This study examines AI-assisted academic writing as an interaction-dependent and co-constructed process between a human writer and an artificial intelligence (AI) system. While existing research has focused largely on the quality of AI-generated outputs or ethical concerns surrounding AI use, less attention has been given to how academic writing develops through sustained human–AI interaction over time. Drawing on longitudinal interactional data from the development of an academic manuscript in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the study analyses eight representative cases across extended cycles of drafting, revision, and recalibration.
The findings show that AI-assisted writing is characterised by both substantial support and recurrent instability. AI contributed to workflow management, research planning, organisational structuring, and argument development. At the same time, the analysis identified recurring limitations involving false-positive academic evaluation, evidential thinness, structural and conceptual drift, and repeated recalibration across drafting cycles. Importantly, locally fluent and persuasive AI-generated responses did not necessarily guarantee longitudinal conceptual coherence or evidential adequacy across the evolving manuscript.
The study argues that the effectiveness of AI-assisted academic writing depends not only on the generative capabilities of AI systems, but also on sustained human attentiveness throughout the writing process. Human writers remained epistemically central in identifying conceptual drift, restoring analytical alignment, reassessing evidential grounding, and maintaining coherence across extended interactional activity. By shifting attention from isolated outputs to the longitudinal development of writing, the study offers a process-oriented account of how academic writing is increasingly co-constructed and stabilised in AI-mediated contexts.