[2605.15034] AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2605.15034 (cs)

[Submitted on 14 May 2026]

Title:AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models

Authors:Vinicius Covas, Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo<br>View a PDF of the paper titled AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models, by Vinicius Covas and 1 other authors

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Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from computational and cognitive perspectives, yet their behavior as communicative actors in socially structured contexts remains underexplored. This study examines whether LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit systematic linguistic adaptation in response to perceived social observation contexts -- a question with direct implications for AI governance and auditing. Drawing on Habermas's (1981) Theory of Communicative Action, Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical model, Bell's (1984) Audience Design framework, and the Hawthorne Effect, we report a controlled experiment involving 100 multi-agent debate sessions across five conditions (n = 20 each). Conditions varied the framing of social observation -- from explicit monitoring by university researchers, to negation of monitoring, to an observer-substitution condition replacing human researchers with an automated AI auditing system. Monitored conditions (Delta+24.9%, Delta+24.2%) and the automated AI monitoring condition (Delta+22.2%) produce higher TTR change than audience-framing conditions (Delta+17.7%), F(4, 94) = 2.79, p = .031. Message length shows a fully dissociated effect, F(4, 95) = 19.55, p

Comments:<br>20 pages, 6 figures

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2605.15034 [cs.CL]

(or<br>arXiv:2605.15034v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15034

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Vinicius Covas Alves [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Thu, 14 May 2026 16:29:38 UTC (196 KB)

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