Reassessing Collaborative Writing Theories and Frameworks in the Age of LLMs: What Still Applies and What We Must Leave Behind

In this paper, we conduct a critical review of existing theories and frameworks on human-human collaborative writing to assess their relevance to the current human-AI paradigm in organizational workplace settings, and draw seven insights along with design implications for human-AI collaborative writing tools. Our main finding was that, as we delegate more writing to AI, our cognitive process shifts from the traditional planning/translating/reviewing process to a planning/waiting/reviewing process, breaking the process due to the waiting that occurs in between. To ensure that our cognitive process remains intact, we suggest a"prototyping"approach, where the tool allows for faster iterations of the cognitive process by starting with smaller chunks of text, and gradually moving on to a fully fleshed-out document. We aim to bring theoretical grounding and practical design guidance to the interaction designs of human-AI collaborative writing, with the goal of enhancing future human-AI writing software.