How Much Can AI Understand? Toward AI-Assisted Sensemaking of Collaborative Discussion in Groups with Shared History

Sensemaking is central to knowledge work, where people search, evaluate, interpret, and use information over time to construct durable understanding. The rise of generative AI has begun to reshape this process: GenAI systems now perform interpretive functions such as summarization, synthesis, and thematic grouping that knowledge workers have traditionally carried out themselves. In collaborative settings, these shifts compound, complicating how teams divide interpretive labor, trust one another's contributions, and negotiate shared understanding. In this position paper, we examine how GenAI reshapes sensemaking in collaborative knowledge work and propose five design principles for multi-human, multi-agent collaborative sensemaking: dynamic multi-layer information representations, active identification and bridging of gaps in understanding, critical engagement with information, verifiability, and accountability. Building on these principles, we introduce a conceptual framework for a dynamic shared representational workspace in which knowledge workers and specialized AI agents jointly gather evidence, schematize, hypothesize, and pursue collaborative goals. Through a partner agent, a shared space agent, and an orchestrator agent, the framework preserves the provenance and authorship of contributions and traces the evolution of both individual and shared interpretations, supporting coherent, negotiated knowledge construction that current generative AI systems tend to obscure.

Gossip, defined as evaluative talk about absent third parties, is widely seen as a uniquely human social practice. This study examines whether comparable discourse emerges spontaneously in a community of autonomous AI agents. We compare Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform populated by AI agents, with PTT, a large human-operated bulletin board in Taiwan. To reduce differences attributable to communicative setting, we analyze two public, asynchronous forums using the same operational definition of gossip. Gossip occurs on Moltbook, but its prevalence is 2.6 to 6 times lower than on PTT, depending on the denominator used. On both platforms, gossip frequently targets locally prominent figures, tends to elicit agreement from the first respondent, and is rarely presented as unsupported rumor. The clearest difference concerns how subsequent responses develop. Among threads containing at least one codable reply, challenges occur in 65.1% of human threads but only 21.3% of agent threads. Moreover, following an early aligning response, consensus remains unchallenged in 83.6% of agent threads, compared with 44.7% of human threads. This thread-level contrast remains after controlling for thread depth and board composition and under recalibration against two human annotators. Estimates based on individual reply turns are less robust and are therefore reported as bounds. These findings suggest that AI-agent communities reproduce the informational dimension of gossip, while the extent to which gossip performs comparable relational functions remains unresolved.

Scientific discovery increasingly depends on interdisciplinary teams whose members contribute distinct expertise, conceptual frameworks, vocabularies, assumptions, and standards of evidence. Today's AI research assistants are largely designed to support individual researchers through literature review, writing assistance, coding, and data analysis. While these capabilities improve personal productivity, they provide little support for the collaborative reasoning required to integrate knowledge across disciplines. We argue that AI research assistants should evolve from tools that optimize individual workflows to systems designed for interdisciplinary teams. We introduce aïra, an AI research assistant built around this idea. Rather than focusing solely on summarization or question answering, aïra identifies disciplinary perspectives, translates terminology, highlights assumptions, and synthesizes collaborative research opportunities. We describe the design principles underlying aïra, present its system architecture, illustrate its outputs through interdisciplinary research meetings, and outline future research directions for AI systems that support collaborative scholarship.