Reactive Writers: How Co-Writing with AI Changes How We Engage with Ideas
Advait Bhat, Marianne Aubin Le Qu\'er\'e, Mor Naaman, Maurice Jakesch

TL;DR
This study explores how co-writing with AI influences writers' engagement with ideas and opinions, revealing a shift to reactive, suggestion-led writing that impacts thought processes and opinion formation.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of Reactive Writing, highlighting procedural and behavioral changes in AI-assisted co-writing and its implications for opinion shaping.
Findings
Engagement with AI suggestions becomes central to the writing process.
Writers often do not complete ideation before engaging with suggestions.
Writers feel in control despite AI's influence, unaware of opinion shifts.
Abstract
Emerging experimental evidence shows that writing with AI assistance can change both the views people express in writing and the opinions they hold afterwards. Yet, we lack substantive understanding of procedural and behavioral changes in co-writing with AI that underlie the observed opinion-shaping power of AI writing tools. We conducted a mixed-methods study, combining retrospective interviews with 19 participants about their AI co-writing experience with a quantitative analysis tracing engagement with ideas and opinions in 1{,}291 AI co-writing sessions. Our analysis shows that engaging with the AI's suggestions -- reading them and deciding whether to accept them -- becomes a central activity in the writing process, taking away from more traditional processes of ideation and language generation. As writers often do not complete their own ideation before engaging with suggestions, the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education · AI in Service Interactions · Mental Health via Writing
