Matched Starts, Divergent Objects: How Human-AI Collaboration Forms What It Explains

Abstract: Scholarly knowledge is typically encountered in stabilized form, while the process histories through which research objects, claims, and contributions acquire form remain largely hidden. This study examines how human-AI scholarly collaboration develops under matched starting conditions and whether those conditions stabilize the inquiry itself. Using a longitudinal corpus of 843 turns, the same expert researcher developed branch-isolated scholarly trajectories with different generative AI systems from the same corpus, frozen research problem, starting prompt, publication objective, and conduct rules. Two eligible trajectories were reconstructed ex post through scholarly trajectory analysis, source-faithful interaction reconstruction, a Socioduality relational-process overlay, and downstream propagation analysis. Both trajectories independently shifted the initial continuity problem from recall toward usability, but subsequently formed different research objects. One trajectory culminated in an endpoint manuscript on continuity labour, the distributed work required to sustain usable collaboration; the other in an endpoint manuscript on distributed, evolving, and unevenly usable project state. Their analytic genealogies involved failed analytical units, rejected explanations, changes in scale, counterexamples, and conceptual stabilization, and propagated into different research questions, findings, methods, evidence logics, and scholarly contributions. Relational analysis further showed that consequential scholarly change, reciprocal continuity, and local substantive re-formation were distinct process structures, and that continuation did not necessarily constitute epistemic endorsement. The findings demonstrate empirically constrained research-object formation within human-AI scholarly collaboration and show how process histories shape the scholarly objects and products that emerge.