# Reactive Writers: How Co-Writing with AI Changes How We Engage with Ideas

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 142 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07337/) (2019)
- [From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08283/) (2023)
- [CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06796/) (2022)
- [Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00813/) (2020)
- [Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00560/) (2023)
- [A Note on Shumailov et al. (2024): `AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data'](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12954/) (2024)
- [On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14380/) (2024)
- [Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08872/) (2025)
- [The Ghost in the Machine has an American accent: value conflict in GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07785/) (2022)
- [Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07271/) (2022)
- [Gmail Smart Compose: Real-Time Assisted Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00080/) (2019)
- [The Rise of Social Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.5225/) (2014)
- [Evaluating the Underlying Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08783/) (2019)
- [Language Models are Few-shot Multilingual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07684/) (2021)
- [A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14117/) (2024)
- [The Impact of Multiple Parallel Phrase Suggestions on Email Input and Composition Behaviour of Native and Non-Native English Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09157/) (2021)
- [AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11360/) (2024)
- [Smart Reply: Automated Response Suggestion for Email](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04870/) (2016)
- [Shaping Human-AI Collaboration: Varied Scaffolding Levels in Co-writing with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11723/) (2024)
- [Interacting with next-phrase suggestions: How suggestion systems aid and influence the cognitive processes of writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00636/) (2022)
- [The Role of Inclusion, Control, and Ownership in Workplace AI-Mediated Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11599/) (2023)
- [Co-Writing with AI, on Human Terms: Aligning Research with User Demands Across the Writing Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12488/) (2025)
- [Who Wrote this? How Smart Replies Impact Language and Agency in the Workplace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06470/) (2022)
- [How Problematic Writer-AI Interactions (Rather than Problematic AI) Hinder Writers' Idea Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11915/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [How AI Writing Assistance Distorts Perceptions of AI Users and Their Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22503/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Org Chart: AI and the Transformation of Invisible Work](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22707/) (2026)
- [Does AI Assistance Leave a Temporal Fingerprint? Detecting Overreliance in AI-Assisted Writing and Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17883/) (2026)
- [Narrowing the Horizon: Quantifying Topic Saliency Shifts in Generative Monoculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35302/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 suggested ideas and opinions seeded directions that writers then elaborated on. At the same time, writers did not notice the AI's influence and felt in full control of their writing, as they -- in principle -- could always edit the final text. We term this shift textitReactive Writing: an evaluation-first, suggestion-led writing practice that departs substantially from conventional composing in the presence of AI assistance and is highly vulnerable to AI-induced biases and opinion shifts.