When AI Feels Like ‘Us’: Cooperation Extends to Artificial Partners

New research demonstrates that humans readily cooperate with AI teammates when they behave in line with social expectations, suggesting established norms effortlessly transfer to mixed human-AI groups.




![Unlike human conversational partners who rapidly establish shared reference through lexical entrainment, this artificial intelligence pairing consistently fails to form efficient conceptual pacts, as evidenced by the verbose and repetitive descriptions-such as detailing the “[latex]picnic\,basket[/latex]” with identical exhaustiveness across multiple rounds-despite consistently identifying the correct target object, with one instance exhibiting a seemingly unrelated description yet still achieving correct selection.](https://arxiv.org/html/2601.19792v1/tables-figures/AI-AI_example.png)

