Vocabulary
Concepts.Defined once.
Coined term
Synthetic authenticity
An AI persona is synthetic in form yet judged authentic enough to act on.
Synthetic authenticity is the condition where an AI persona is synthetic in form yet is judged authentic enough for a person to trust it, buy from it, learn from it, or confide in it. It locates authenticity in the audience's judgment rather than in any property of the system. A persona does not become authentic by being more human; it becomes authentic when a person decides it is real enough for the decision in front of them.
The authenticity paradox (IJHCI, 2026)
Related: authenticity · artificial intelligence · trust
Coined term
The threshold model of synthetic authenticity
Human cues help up to a threshold, then start breaking trust.
The threshold model holds that the relationship between human cueing and authenticity judgment is not monotonic. Below the threshold a persona reads as too thin to engage with. Above it, added realism invites scrutiny rather than trust. The design target is the threshold, not the maximum. Built from a map of 2,685 articles and 111 AI-persona studies.
The authenticity paradox (IJHCI, 2026)
Related: uncanny valley · anthropomorphism · human-computer interaction
Coined term
Calibrated sufficiency
Enough cueing for the task, deliberately no more.
Calibrated sufficiency is the design position that follows from the threshold model. A persona should carry the cues the task requires and stop there. It reframes persona design from a realism race into a calibration problem, where the correct amount of human signal depends on the role the persona occupies and the stakes of the decision.
The authenticity paradox (IJHCI, 2026)
Related: uncanny valley · anthropomorphism
Coined term
The transparency tax
AI disclosure buys attention and charges authenticity.
The transparency tax names the trade-off an account pays when it discloses that it is AI. Across 1,531 Instagram posts, disclosure lifted engagement 19.2%. Felt authenticity fell where the account leaned too hard on disclosing. Transparency is therefore not free and not linear: it is a purchase of attention made with authenticity.
The transparency tax on virtual influencer engagement (under review)
Related: virtual influencer · influencer marketing · advertising
Coined term
Collaborative persuasion knowledge
Persuasion knowledge assembled by a group rather than held by a person.
Persuasion knowledge has been treated as something an individual consumer holds. Collaborative persuasion knowledge describes what happens when it is assembled in public: one viewer's private suspicion becomes the next viewer's starting evidence, and the group's competence exceeds any single member's.
Crowd forensics and warrant braiding (Journal of Advertising, in press)
Related: persuasion · virtual influencer · virtual community
Coined term
Crowd forensics
Comment threads behaving like investigations.
Crowd forensics describes the investigative register that public comment threads adopt around a suspected AI persona. Participants gather artefacts, compare frames, date images, and test claims. The thread stops being a reaction and starts being an inquiry.
Crowd forensics and warrant braiding (Journal of Advertising, in press)
Related: virtual community · virtual influencer
Coined term
Warrant braiding
Separate weak clues twisted into one strong shared verdict.
Warrant braiding is the mechanism by which individually inconclusive cues are combined into a verdict the group treats as settled. No single clue would convince anyone. Braided together and made public, they carry more weight than the sum of their parts.
Crowd forensics and warrant braiding (Journal of Advertising, in press)
Related: source credibility · persuasion
Coined term
Burdenless listening
Confiding in something that asks nothing back.
Burdenless listening names why people open up to companion AI. A human listener incurs a debt: attention has to be returned. An AI listener does not, which lowers the cost of disclosure. From 3,670 posts and reviews, the same absence of reciprocity that makes confiding easy is what makes leaving feel like a loss.
Burdenless listening in AI care markets (revise and resubmit)
Related: chatbot · parasocial interaction · artificial intelligence
Coined term
Public advice adjudication
Private advice carried into a community and re-tried in the open.
Public advice adjudication is the sequence that runs from an inherited recommendation, to a carrier object posted in public, to community scrutiny, to adjudicated advice. It moves the research question from whether an individual trusts a source toward how a group reconstructs a recommendation it did not receive.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: virtual community · Reddit · distributed cognition
Coined term
Public advice object
A recommendation turned into something strangers can quote and edit.
A public advice object is a digitally persistent and editable representation of inherited advice. It has four separable elements: source attribution, recommendation content, carrier framing, and visible warrants. Once advice becomes an object, it can be reproduced, recombined, and rewritten by people who were not in the original encounter.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: distributed cognition · virtual community
Coined term
Carrier framing
The stance the person carries the advice in with.
The carrier is the person who received advice and posts it for review. Carrier framing is the stance they express in doing so: credible, questionable, incomplete, overpriced, self-serving. Posting is already an adjudicative act, which is why the carrier's attitude must never be read as the community's.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: virtual community · source credibility
Coined term
Scrutiny composition
Not how much a group criticises, but what it criticises.
Scrutiny composition asks where a community directs its critical attention rather than how much attention it pays. AI advice draws complaints that it is generic, templated, or missing context. Human advice draws questions about the adviser's diagnosis, procedure, necessity and incentives. The split measures 55.8 standardised percentage points, which is a compositional difference, not a volume one.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: distributed cognition · trust · recommender system
Named construct
Genericity scrutiny
The complaint AI advice attracts: broad, templated, context-free.
Genericity scrutiny records claims that advice is broad, templated, stale, prompt-dependent, insufficiently validated, or missing decision-relevant constraints. It is the accountability surface an AI-attributed recommendation exposes. In this corpus it concentrates in technology and electronics.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: artificial intelligence · large language model
Named construct
Adviser-process scrutiny
The complaint human advice attracts: how did you get there?
Adviser-process scrutiny records questions about competence, diagnosis, procedure, necessity, honesty, incentives, or role suitability. It is the accountability surface a human-attributed recommendation exposes, and it runs 55.1 points higher for human advisers than for AI.
When advice goes public (under review)
Related: source credibility · trust
Coined term
Role-based acceptability
How much AI a role can carry before people object.
Role-based acceptability holds that tolerance for an AI communicator is set by the role it occupies rather than by the technology in it. The same system is unremarkable in one seat and unacceptable in the next, because roles differ in what is at stake and in how much the audience needs to know what kind of thing is speaking.
When the communicator is code (under review)
Related: social robot · chatbot · human-computer interaction
Named construct
Ontological load
The effort of working out what kind of thing is speaking.
Ontological load is the cost a person carries when the category of their interlocutor is unsettled. People keep re-checking whether they are dealing with a person or a system, and that quiet, repeated check consumes attention and shapes what they end up believing.
When the communicator is code (under review)
Related: anthropomorphism · human-computer interaction · chatbot
