"Nobody Did This": Contribution, Originality, and Accountability in Agent-Mediated Collaboration

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the “contribution erasure” problem emerging in knowledge-intensive collaborative workflows mediated by large language model agents, where blurred attribution and ambiguous originality undermine traditional accountability mechanisms grounded in provenance logs or usage declarations. The work introduces the concept of contribution erasure, arguing that the crisis of accountability stems from individuals’ uncertainty about their own original contributions and permeates collaborative relationships. Through participatory workshops, qualitative analysis, and collaborative experiments, the research investigates the socio-technical conditions necessary to sustain meaningful accountability. Challenging dominant paradigms that reduce accountability to documentation, this project articulates a shared research agenda on contribution and accountability in agent-mediated collaboration and lays the groundwork for infrastructures designed to counteract contribution erasure.

Abstract

Collaborative knowledge work is changing in ways that go beyond disclosure or transparency. LLM agents are now embedded in how teams research, design, write, and decide: mediating between members, synthesizing inputs, reformulating ideas, and drafting shared outputs. They do not only facilitate collaboration; they operate within the workflow at the moment contributions are being formed. In doing so, they risk undermining the social conditions under which contributions can be witnessed, attributed, and held accountable. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to confront what we call contribution dissolution: the blurring of attribution, originality, and accountability in agent-mediated collaborative work. We argue that this dissolution begins before collaboration itself, in the individual worker's own uncertainty about what is genuinely theirs, and propagates through collaborative relationships, collapsing the reliability that makes productive intellectual exchange possible. Through position statements, mapping exercises, and a hands-on activity, participants will surface how framing accountability as a documentation problem (e.g., AI use statements, watermarking, provenance logs) overlooks the conditions under which accountability is produced. Our goal is to produce a shared research agenda and the foundations of an infrastructural response to contribution dissolution in collaborative knowledge work.

Problem

• contribution dissolution
• attribution
• originality
• accountability
• agent-mediated collaboration

Innovation

• contribution dissolution
• agent-mediated collaboration
• accountability
• attribution
• LLM agents