Engineering Trust, Creating Vulnerability: A Socio-Technical Analysis of AI Interface Design

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI interface design fosters new interdisciplinary cultures and vulnerabilities by merging technical, psychological, and social elements, revealing four key vectors of cognitive security risks.

Contribution

It introduces the IMCS framework to analyze how AI interfaces act as boundary objects that generate new research cultures and vulnerability vectors across disciplines.

Findings

Identification of four vulnerability vectors: Reflection Simulation, Authority Modulation, Cognitive Load Exploitation, Market-Security Tension.

Demonstration of interfaces as sites of epistemological collision and methodological pressure.

Empirical analysis across multiple domains showing how interdisciplinary integration occurs culturally, not just methodologically.

Abstract

This paper examines how distinct cultures of AI interdisciplinarity emerge through interface design, revealing the formation of new disciplinary cultures at these intersections. Through the Interface-Mediated Cognitive Security (IMCS) framework, I demonstrate how the collision of cybersecurity engineering, cognitive psychology, critical technology studies, and human-computer interaction generates research cultures that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. AI interfaces function as transformative boundary objects that necessitate methodological fusion rather than mere collaboration, simultaneously embodying technical architectures, psychological design patterns, and social interaction models. Through systematic visual analysis of generative AI platforms and case studies across public sector, medical, and educational domains, I identify four vulnerability vectors, Reflection Simulation, Authority Modulation, Cognitive Load Exploitation, and Market-Security Tension, that structure interface-mediated cognitive security. This research challenges three significant gaps in interdisciplinary theory: the assumption that disciplines maintain distinct methodological boundaries during collaboration, the belief that technical and social knowledge practices can be cleanly separated, and the presumption that disciplinary integration occurs through formal rather than cultural mechanisms. The empirical evidence demonstrates how interfaces function as sites of epistemological collision, creating methodological pressure zones where traditional disciplinary approaches prove insufficient for analysing the complex socio-technical phenomena at the interface.