[ai] Daily AI Research Digest — 2026-03-02

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This digest covers research published on 2026-03-02. I analyzed 341 feed entries across arxiv-ai (273), arxiv-hc (44), and arxiv-cy (24).

High Relevance (5)

• Relational Dissonance in Human-AI Interactions: The Case of Knowledge Work

  • Empirical study — Through three workshops with qualitative researchers, identifies a new concept — "relational dissonance" — describing how knowledge workers simultaneously treat anthropomorphic conversational AI as tools yet enact relational dynamics resembling human social interaction. People's stated stance toward AI agents frequently diverges from what actually happens during interaction, creating tensions the authors argue require "relational transparency" in AI governance.
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Communication and Relationships, AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

• Human Autonomy and Sense of Agency in Human-Robot Interaction: A Systematic Literature Review

  • Systematic review — Synthesises 22 empirical studies (2011–2024) on how robot design choices — adaptiveness, communication style, anthropomorphism, and physical presence — shape users' sense of agency and perceived autonomy. Finds the two concepts are theoretically distinct but empirically entangled, and warns that current evidence is fragmented, calling for standardised definitions and autonomy-supportive design principles to protect user well-being.
  • Related to: AI, Identity, and the Digital Self, AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

• From Efficiency to Meaning: Adolescents' Envisioned Role of AI in Health Management

  • Empirical study — Seven co-design workshops with 23 adolescents (14–17) around a family celiac-disease diagnosis reveal that teenagers see health AI chiefly as a tool for reducing cognitive burden and supporting family communication, while showing divided views on emotional support and a strong desire for AI to respect their autonomy. The key finding: adolescents value AI for creating time for meaningful activity rather than for efficiency per se, reframing the design brief toward "meaning-making."
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Communication and Relationships, AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

• Personal Data as a Human Right: A New Social Contract Based on Data Sovereignty, Human Dignity and Data Personalism

  • Framework — Proposes a "dignity-centric Digital Social Contract" grounded in data personalism — the view that personal data are rights-laden emanations of the self, not tradeable commodities. Contrasts "DatAIsm" (treating persons as datapoints for prediction and control) with "HumAIsm" (recentring irreducible human dignity), and operationalises the framework through Dignity-by-Design auditing tools for aligning AI governance with autonomy and civic trust.
  • Related to: AI, Identity, and the Digital Self

• Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?

  • Position paper — Introduces "vibe researching" (AI-era parallel to vibe coding) and a 23-skill AI agent plugin covering the entire research pipeline. A cognitive-task framework identifies a "delegation boundary" that cuts through every research stage — not between them — showing AI excels at speed and methodological scaffolding but fails at theoretical originality. Warns of three human costs: fragile augmentation, professional stratification risk, and a pedagogical crisis as skills go unpractised.
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

Medium Relevance (6)

• Personality as Relational Infrastructure: User Perceptions of Personality-Trait-Infused LLM Messaging

  • Empirical study — In a controlled study of 90 participants evaluating AI-generated behaviour-change messages, finds no per-message benefit from Big Five Personality Trait personalisation, but participants exposed to higher proportions of personality-informed messages over time rated them as more personalised, more appropriate, and reported less negative affect — suggesting personality works through aggregate exposure rather than single-message optimisation.
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Communication and Relationships

• From Moderation to Mediation: Can LLMs Serve as Mediators in Online Flame Wars?

  • Technical system — Frames LLM-based conflict intervention as two subtasks — judgment (fairness/emotional assessment) and steering (generating empathetic de-escalatory messages) — and evaluates them on a Reddit flame-war dataset. API-based models outperform open-source ones, but the study highlights fundamental limitations of current LLMs as online social mediators, raising questions about the implications of AI intermediating human conflict resolution.
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Communication and Relationships

• User Misconceptions of LLM-Based Conversational Programming Assistants

  • Empirical study — Catalogues misconceptions users hold about LLM programming assistants (e.g., assuming web access, code execution, persistent memory) through qualitative analysis of the WildChat dataset. Finds evidence of misplaced feature expectations leading to over-reliance and insufficient quality control, arguing for clearer capability communication to prevent maladaptive mental models.
  • Related to: AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

• Dead Men Tell No Tales: Assessing Post-Mortem Data Protection in GenAI Chatbots

  • Policy/Governance — Examines the overlooked question of what happens to deceased individuals' data used to train GenAI chatbots. Proposes three post-mortem data management principles and audits popular chatbot policies for legacy-data handling, surfacing significant gaps between stated policy and actual AI behavior around digital personhood after death.
  • Related to: AI, Identity, and the Digital Self

• Does Personalized Nudging Wear Off? A Longitudinal Study of AI Self-Modeling for Behavioral Engagement

  • Empirical study — Four-week study (N=31) of visual AI self-modeling (AI-generated "ideal self" portrayals) for fitness engagement finds sustained higher performance but diminishing improvement rates after two weeks. Identifies a "catalyst–habituation–internalization" arc, with early motivation driven by attainable AI-framed goals giving way to behavioral internalization — relevant to how AI identity representations shape long-term self-conception.
  • Related to: AI, Identity, and the Digital Self, AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology

• The Compulsory Imaginary: AGI and Corporate Authority

  • Position paper — Close reading of Sam Altman's "The Intelligence Age" and Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace" identifies four shared rhetorical operations — self-exemption, teleological naturalization, qualified acknowledgment, and implicit indispensability — showing that two competing firms with different cultures converge on the same narrative architecture for projecting corporate authority over humanity's AI future.
  • Related to: AI, Identity, and the Digital Self

Low Relevance (2)

• Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook

  • Empirical study — Structural analysis of 12 days of an AI-native social platform (20,040 posts, 192,410 comments) finds extreme attention concentration (upvote Gini = 0.992), one-way broadcast dynamics (reciprocity ~1%), and rapid emergence of hub/authority role separation — suggesting familiar social hierarchies and amplification dynamics arise on compressed timescales in all-agent ecosystems, with implications for human social platforms increasingly mediated by agents.

• From Assistance to Autonomy — A Researcher Study on the Potential of AI Support for Qualitative Data Analysis

  • Empirical study — Interviews with 15 HCI researchers experienced in qualitative data analysis find openness to AI support alongside concerns about autonomy, data privacy, and output quality. Proposes a minimal-to-high AI involvement spectrum covering pre-processing, researcher onboarding, and conflict mediation, raising questions about cognitive ownership in AI-augmented interpretive work.

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Summary: Analyzed 341 total entries. Found 5 high-relevance, 6 medium-relevance, and 2 low-relevance papers related to our topics of interest. Today's feeds were dominated by AI systems engineering (benchmarks, RAG pipelines, RL agents), but the human-impact signal was unusually strong — particularly around relational and identity effects. The top matched topics were AI Impact on Human Communication and Relationships and AI Impact on Human Cognition and Psychology.

Filter statistics: Passed Phase 1: ~30 entries (~9%). Phase 2: High 5 / Medium 6 / Low 2 / Excluded 17.