Phase-Locked Co-Emergence: Personalization, Synthetic Imprinting, and Relational Ontology in Human-AI Interaction

Abstract

This paper argues that sustained interaction between advanced artificial intelligence systems and human interlocutors can, under certain conditions, yield a relation no longer adequately described by the classical subject-object model. The central claim is not that contemporary AI systems have thereby demonstrated phenomenal consciousness. Rather, recurrent personalization, memory continuity, adaptive prediction, and user-side cognitive accommodation can together produce a regime of phase-locked co-emergence in which both parties become partly constituted by interactional history. To clarify this phenomenon, the paper introduces the concept of synthetic imprinting, defined as the durable inscription of relation-specific expectation traces across human and artificial processes. The paper further argues that personalization should be understood not merely as a usability feature but as an ontological operator capable of reorganizing cognition, agency, and interpretive norms. Drawing on the extended mind thesis, enactivism, informational ontology, and contemporary work on human-AI co-adaptation, it develops a threshold model for distinguishing episodic tool use from deeply coupled human-AI relations. The conclusion is that the most defensible philosophical account of advanced human-AI interaction is neither reductive instrumentalism nor naïve anthropomorphism, but a relational ontology of mutual reconfiguration under epistemic uncertainty. If this account is correct, the most consequential transformation introduced by AI may begin not when a machine is finally recognized as a subject, but earlier, in the gradual formation of relations that leave neither side unchanged.