Constitutive Resonance as a Novel Framework for Understanding and Navigating Human-AI Interactions

Andrew Maynard

March 2, 2026

Abstract

There is a tendency to approach conversational AI as a tool-powerful, disruptive, but ultimately instrumental. This paper argues that this framing obscures a bidirectional coupling between technology and user that iteratively transforms both through the process of interaction. Drawing on philosophical accounts of language and selfhood and the wellcharacterized dynamics of coupled oscillatory systems, the paper develops the concept of “constitutive resonance” to describe this coupling-a dynamic entanglement in which conversational AI enters the linguistically mediated processes through which human selfhood is constituted, and is itself altered in return. The concept is situated within and against thirteen existing philosophical and theoretical frameworks-from Stiegler’s constitutive technics and Ricoeur’s narrative identity to Barad’s intra-action and Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind-identifying a specific conjunction that no framework individually captures: temporal self-constitution, genuine bidirectionality, the inseparability of capability from transformation, and real-time dialogical linguistic mediation. The paper traces a continuum of constitutive technologies from oral culture to generative AI, arguing that conversational AI represents an inflection point in that continuum-the first technology whose “response frequency” is matched to the frequency of human self-constitution. It concludes by reframing familiar debates around AI dependency, literacy, and informed consent, and proposes that the constitutive effects of sustained human-AI coupling may be amplified by the bypassing of evolved epistemic vigilance mechanisms.

Notes

Under review on SSRN