Talking Past the Machine: Morality, Politeness, and Alignment in Human-AI Dialogue

Marina Mitiaeva, Lu Xiao

Conversational AI systems produce fluent, socially appropriate responses, yet whether they participate in cooperative communication or merely simulate its surface forms remains unclear - a question central to how these systems are evaluated, trusted, and designed. This study investigates how morality, politeness, and alignment - three dimensions central to cooperative dialogue - function in human-AI interaction compared to human-human conversation. We analyze 15,881 human-ChatGPT and 10,784 human-human multi-turn dialogues, using mixed-effects models to identify which features predict turn-to-turn alignment. We observe a consistent dissociation: AI produces the surface features of cooperative communication without the underlying social architecture. Moral output appears preconfigured rather than negotiated; warmth is generated without face sensitivity; linguistic convergence declines persistently. Most strikingly, the cooperative mechanisms themselves reverse direction: hedging and softening associated with greater accommodation between humans are associated with reduced alignment when produced by AI, and purity framing associated with human divergence coincides with users…