Framing 'Collaboration': How Human-Human Principles Translate into Human-AI Realities

The recent advancement of AI has shifted terminology: humans “use” computers but “collaborate with” AI. This anthropomorphic framing shapes expectations of system capabilities. Despite the large body of research adopting “human-AI collaboration” as a term, there seems to be little consensus on a definition of the concept at a glance. To address this potential gap and to provide a comprehensive overview of existing related literature, we first conducted a thematic analysis on human-human collaboration literature (n=60) to extract definitional components and associated concepts. Second, we analyzed publications on human-AI collaboration (n=299) using OpenAI’s GPT4o mini and o3 mini models, mapping the identified concepts to the AI context to examine the extent to which these concepts of collaboration are represented there. Our findings provide a shared conceptual foundation to support interdisciplinary research and suggest future research directions. Additionally, they inform the design of human-AI interfaces and interaction processes, bridging theory and practice.