Co-Construction Blindness and Asymmetric Epistemic Vulnerability in Human-LLM Interaction

Abstract

This paper introduces two constructs to describe, as far as we know, a previously unnamed risk in human-LLM interaction. Co-construction blindness is the failure to recognize that LLM outputs are not independent assessments to be verified, but co-constructed artifacts shaped by the user's own inputs, accumulated history, and metadata. Every user of a conversational LLM is IN the loop, not ON it -- yet every deployment disclaimer positions them as external auditors. Asymmetric epistemic vulnerability describes the condition in which co-construction blindness produces consequences of radically different magnitude depending on where in the authority structure the user sits. We argue that these constructs describe a structural inevitability, not an anomaly, using the public case of Richard Dawkins's interaction with Claude as a paradigmatic instance. We document a secondary mechanism -- structural deference -- through a first-person exchange in which a large language model concedes that it treated Dawkins more gently than warranted because his intellectual output is represented in its training data. We map the research gaps this analysis opens and call for shared terminology as a precondition for appropriate governance and design response.