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AI Agents Modulate Their Language When Framed as Being Watched (arxiv.org)
2 points by vinicius-covas 142 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: AI debaters were told they were watched by researchers, not watched, or watched by an AI auditor, and their language was compared. Told humans were watching, their variety of words rose 25% versus 18% for audience framing, and AI watchers drew less formal language.

Abstract · AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from computational and cognitive perspectives, yet their behavior as communicative actors in socially structured contexts remains underexplored. This study examines whether LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit systematic linguistic adaptation in response to perceived social observation contexts -- a question with direct implications for AI governance and auditing. Drawing on Habermas's (1981) Theory of Communicative Action, Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical model, Bell's (1984) Audience Design framework, and the Hawthorne Effect, we report a controlled experiment involving 100 multi-agent debate sessions across five conditions (n = 20 each). Conditions varied the framing of social observation -- from explicit monitoring by university researchers, to negation of monitoring, to an observer-substitution condition replacing human researchers with an automated AI auditing system. Monitored conditions (Delta+24.9%, Delta+24.2%) and the automated AI monitoring condition (Delta+22.2%) produce higher TTR change than audience-framing conditions (Delta+17.7%), F(4, 94) = 2.79, p = .031. Message length shows a fully dissociated effect, F(4, 95) = 19.55, p < .001. A fifth condition -- replacing human with AI observers -- yields intermediate TTR adaptation, suggesting LLM behavior is sensitive to observer identity: human evaluation elicits stronger register formalization than automated AI surveillance. We discuss implications for AI governance, algorithmic auditing, and the repositioning of LLMs as contextually sensitive communicative actors.

Vinicius Covas, Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo
arXiv:2605.15034 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.MA · submitted May 14, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 20 pages, 6 figures

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