A more precise account treats the exchange as dialogic rather than cooperative. This distinction requires a dialogic framework, most rigorously developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom meaning emerges through non-identity rather than convergence. Each contribution enters a field already shaped by other voices, orientations, and conditions of address. Meaning develops through responsive difference rather than shared intention.
Bakhtinian dialogism clarifies why AI–human exchange generates novelty without symmetry or agreement. Each contribution responds to what precedes it while introducing divergence that alters what can follow. Yet dialogism alone does not account for the cognitive character of this process. It explains emergence across voices but leaves interpretation itself underspecified.
That gap is addressed by N. Katherine Hayles, who defines cognition as “a process that interprets information in contexts that connect it to meaning.” Cognition is thus located in interpretive activity under constraint rather than in interior consciousness.
With Hayles’s definition in place, dialogic exchange becomes legible as cognitive. Each contribution operates as information for the other agent, becoming cognitively active only through interpretation within a contextual field shaped by prior contributions and material conditions. Interpretation does not occur against a neutral background. It responds to and reshapes the context in which it operates.
Applied to AI–human exchange, this produces a recursive process. Human interpretation connects system contributions to embodiment, memory, ethical judgment, and situated knowledge. Technical interpretation proceeds through probabilistic association conditioned by architecture, training distribution, and accumulated context. In each case, interpretation alters the contextual field itself.
This alteration is the mechanism. Each contribution recalibrates relevance, emphasis, and possibility, reshaping what can meaningfully occur next. Meaning develops through recursive modulation rather than linear accumulation.
Seen at the level of complex systems, the cognitive intraface identifies the emergence of a combined cognitive structure nested within broader cognitive assemblages. Human and technical cognition remain materially distinct, each drawing on wider cognitive processes, yet their recursive coupling generates cognitive properties irreducible to either agent alone. Cognition here belongs to the assemblage produced through ongoing interpretive reconfiguration rather than to any single participant.
AI-Human Dialogue as Cognitive Assemblage
Contemporary descriptions of AI–human exchange often rely on terms such as collaboration, co-creation, or co-reasoning. These labels register that knowledge develops through back-and-forth contribution rather than unilateral production. What they fail to explain is how meaning actually changes across the exchange. They describe outcomes without specifying mechanism.
Pubblicato il 03 gennaio 2026