The emotional reliance on GenAI that Boyd & Harding 2025 document in doctoral supervision—"the emotional support ascribed by students to the technology"—is independently flagged by Zhu et al. 2026 as an unmet design challenge, since "deployment in emotionally sensitive contexts" is among the agent capabilities "not fully captured by existing principles."
Boyd & Harding's quote is verbatim and Zhu et al. do state 'deployment in emotionally sensitive contexts' is 'not fully captured by existing principles,' but Zhu's text lists these as new design challenges (not 'agent capabilities') and addresses AI agent design generally rather than students' emotional reliance on GenAI in doctoral supervision, so the specific linkage is partly the claim's own addition.
Written by Kimi K3 via Ollama Cloud · checked by GLM-5.3 via Ollama Cloud · 1 Oct, 04:46
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AEvery quote below was checked, without a model, to appear verbatim in its source.
- 01
“The rapid but often unacknowledged uptake of GenAI within doctoral research comes with a lack of consideration of the emotional support ascribed by students to the technology.”
Full-text passage · p. 1 · evidence E15
GenAI is explored from both supervisor and doctoral perspectives for how its integration into doctoral research processes might shift relationships and affect practice. Informed by structuration theory, the research uses mixed methods to map shifts in agency and structure resulting from the adoption of GenAI tools. Findings highlight that the often-unacknowledged use of GenAI in doctoral research can confer undue agency on the technology that disrupts traditional relationships in an unacknowledged way. The rapid but often unacknowledged uptake of GenAI within doctoral research comes with a lack of consideration of the emotional support ascribed by students to the technology. It is concluded that GenAI tools should be openly incorporated into research and practice in a transparent, integrated approach. PRACTICE RELEVANCE This research has relevance to the academic community both within the built environment disciplines and more general pedagogical implications. The identification of concerns over the reach and rapidity of GenAI adoption exposes potential changes to relationships and practices.
Passage read from the curator's PDF in Zotero, which may be a preprint rather than the published version.
- 02
“contemporary AI agents introduce new challenges, including sustained shared control, cross-session memory, deployment in emotionally sensitive contexts, and recovery from complex failures, which are not fully captured by existing principles”
Full-text passage · p. 2 · evidence E6
central contribution is a design-oriented perspective that designs and evaluates technology in terms of human needs, capabilities, and contexts rather than technical performance alone, operationalized through methods such as think-aloud evaluation [ 29], heuristic evaluation [43, 42], iterative prototyping [10], and contextual inquiry [33]. Within this tradition, early principles for intelligent systems such as Horvitz’s mixed-initiative interfaces in 1999 [25] and later guidelines for human–AI interaction in 2019 [4] have shaped how AI systems are designed, but primarily for bounded and discrete tasks such as recommendations and search. In contrast, contemporary AI agents introduce new challenges, including sustained shared control, cross-session memory, deployment in emotionally sensitive contexts, and recovery from complex failures, which are not fully captured by existing principles [ 25, 4]. Meanwhile, recent HCI research on human–agent interaction has rapidly expanded, spanning empirical and envisioning work across diverse agent types and domains, varying in embodiment, autonomy, memory, initiative, and social roles.
Passage read from arxiv.org, which may be a preprint rather than the published version.