Nathanael Jo
Publications
Alignment has a Fantasia Problem
In accomplishing complex tasks, human cognition typically progresses from abstract to concrete (e.g., from brainstorming ideas to writing an essay). With the advent of highly capable AI assistants, people now offload various parts of their task to the system. However, instruction-tuned AI systems, even when designed to infer implicit intent, lack an understanding of humans' cognitive processes. When a user approaches AI while their goals and intentions are abstract, AI systems often short circuit their cognitive process through which those goals would be refined by jumping toward a final output (e.g., writing the essay entirely). Doing so takes away the user's agency in achieving the task: they may need to spend more time revising or, worse, settle on a suboptimal outcome. We call these failures Fantasia interactions after the famous Disney scene. We argue that Fantasia interactions demand a rethinking of alignment research, where AI systems optimize how cognitive responsibility is allocated within an interaction. We highlight gaps in state-of-the-art alignment methods, and outline a research agenda for training and evaluating models to achieve this vision.
Incentives shape how humans co-create with generative AI
Generative AI is quickly becoming an integral part of people's everyday workflows. Early evidence has shown that while generative AI can increase individual-level productivity, it does so at the cost of collective diversity, potentially narrowing the set of ideas and perspectives produced. Our research stands in contrast to this concern: through a pre-registered randomized control trial, we show that incentives mediate AI's homogenizing force in a creative writing task where participants can use AI interactively. Participants rewarded for originality relative to peers produce collectively more diverse writing than those rewarded for quality alone. This divergence is driven not by abandoning AI, but by how participants use it: those incentivized for originality incorporate fewer AI suggestions verbatim, relying on the model more selectively for brainstorming, proofreading, and targeted edits. Our results reveal that the effects of generative AI depend not only on the technology itself, but also the behavioral strategies and incentive structures surrounding its use.