David R. Gruber and Donovan Conley (both Communication Studies) published a co-authored paper titled, "The architecture of anomaly: agential errancy in human-AI relations" in Critical Studies in Communication. The article examines errors arising amid human and AI interaction, theorizing them as “agential errors,” namely, as generative performances of the human-nonhuman co-developmental relationship and not as mere failures to be expunged. The paper identifies three types of agential errancy: the grammatical-stylistic, or errors strategically deployed by humans inside of AI texts to perform human authenticity; epistemic errors, or AI-hallucinated sources and unverifiable knowledge claims that expose the rhetorical nature of epistemic solidity; and social errors, or decorous practices of politeness in AI interactions, which Large Language Models tend to over-perform but do not require. In each case, the error operates not as a simplistic breakdown demanding repair but as a recursive, co-developmental event that reshapes human-AI systems, causing them to “reload,” resulting in new standards, habits, and possibilities. The paper then concludes that “the error” will shift over time alongside each “agential” realization; however, each instance exposes just how the human is not equivalent to the AI nor the AI to the human.
