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Common ground in artificial intelligence applications

  • Elke Diedrichsen

    Dr. Elke Diedrichsen is an independent researcher associated with the Computational and Functional Linguistics Research Group at Technological University, Dublin, Department of Informatics. She has worked in universities across Germany, and in multinational IT companies in Ireland. Dr. Diedrichsen has co-edited volumes and published articles about intercultural pragmatics, functional linguistics, and Natural Language Processing. Her most recent research interest is the semiotic, cultural and interactional potential of digital communication.

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Published/Copyright: August 4, 2025
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Abstract

With the advance of contemporary internet based artificial intelligence (AI), many interactive scenarios emerge. The interaction between a user and their device centers around the provision and build-up of information that is recorded for further individual or communicative usage. Social media and messaging services are providing AI-based affordances that enable the implementation of adjacency, the provision of background knowledge and recipient design through links and hashtags, and expressions of stance and acknowledgement through likes. Further to that, virtual assistant technologies have become popular and widespread. Through AI, the mobile and home-based assistants are built to directly employ and facilitate pragmatic realities of communication, like turn taking, talk and reaction on the basis of common ground, addresses and ways of responding to them. In this article, I show that modern AI applications for domestic and mobile communication usage, both between humans and for human-machine interaction, are built around the idea of common ground. Taking into account the privacy concerns that are associated with sizable data transmission, I introduce the term übercommon ground for information that is tracked from users’ online activity and used for the benefit of a better browsing experience, but also potentially passed on without the users’ consent.


Corresponding author: Elke Diedrichsen, Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, E-mail:

About the author

Elke Diedrichsen

Dr. Elke Diedrichsen is an independent researcher associated with the Computational and Functional Linguistics Research Group at Technological University, Dublin, Department of Informatics. She has worked in universities across Germany, and in multinational IT companies in Ireland. Dr. Diedrichsen has co-edited volumes and published articles about intercultural pragmatics, functional linguistics, and Natural Language Processing. Her most recent research interest is the semiotic, cultural and interactional potential of digital communication.

Appendices
Appendix A

PDF transcript of the chat with Microsoft Bing’s Copilot, recorded on 29 April, 2024. “You” refers to the prompt giver. The transcript of Copilot prompts and responses can be found in Figures A1A3.

Figure A1: 
CoPilot.
Figure A1:

CoPilot.

Figure A2: 
CoPilot continued.
Figure A2:

CoPilot continued.

Figure A3: 
Copilot continued.
Figure A3:

Copilot continued.

Figure B1: 
ChatGPT.
Figure B1:

ChatGPT.

Figure B2: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B2:

ChatGPT continued.

Figure B3: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B3:

ChatGPT continued.

Figure B4: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B4:

ChatGPT continued.

Figure B5: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B5:

ChatGPT continued.

Figure B6: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B6:

ChatGPT continued.

Figure B7: 
ChatGPT continued.
Figure B7:

ChatGPT continued.

Appendix B

PDF transcript of the chat with Open AI’s ChatGPT, recorded on 29 April, 2024. The transcript can be found in Figures B1B7.

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Published Online: 2025-08-04
Published in Print: 2025-04-28

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