Presentation Schedule
Hollow Work: when AI-Mediated Knowledge Work Passes Inspection but Bypasses Comprehension (110281)
Session Chair: Eduard O. Merc
Saturday, 11 July 2026 10:20
Session: Session 2
Room: UCL Torrington, B08 (Basement Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
For most of the history of professional knowledge work, producing an artifact and understanding it were the same activity. Writing a legal brief required holding the case law in your head. Drafting clinical notes required processing the encounter. Building software required reasoning through the logic. The work was slow enough that comprehension was a structural byproduct of production.
Generative AI breaks that link. A professional can now produce a document, a brief, a clinical note, or an analysis without building the mental model that previously came with production. The output looks competent, passes routine checks, and ships without anyone having built the mental model that producing it used to require. This paper calls the resulting class of artifacts "hollow work": output that has the shape of competent professional product but lacks the understanding that producing it used to require.
Hollow work is not a quality problem that better prompting solves. It is a structural condition in which the review chain, built for an era when producing work and understanding it coincided, no longer catches the gap. The presentation introduces CLEAR, a framework of five institutional practices (Custody, Living artifacts, Epistemic boundaries, Auditable review, Risk calibration) that attach comprehension back to authorship. Most of these practices already exist in mature professions. The one genuinely new obligation is marking, inside the artifact, what AI produced and what the responsible human actually verified.
The framework is grounded in case analysis across law, medicine, software engineering, academic publishing, and higher education administration.
Authors:
Dale Pike, Virginia Tech, United States
About the Presenter(s)
Mr Dale Pike is a School Administrator at Virginia Tech in United States
Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalepike/
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