- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Significance
As AI tools become increasingly prevalent in workplaces, understanding the social dynamics of AI adoption is crucial. Through four experiments with over 4,400 participants, we reveal a social penalty for AI use: Individuals who use AI tools face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from others. These judgments manifest as both anticipated and actual social penalties, creating a paradox where productivity-enhancing AI tools can simultaneously improve performance and damage one’s professional reputation. Our findings identify a potential barrier to AI adoption and highlight how social perceptions may reduce the acceptance of helpful technologies in the workplace.
Abstract
Despite the rapid proliferation of AI tools, we know little about how people who use them are perceived by others. Drawing on theories of attribution and impression management, we propose that people believe they will be evaluated negatively by others for using AI tools and that this belief is justified. We examine these predictions in four preregistered experiments (N = 4,439) and find that people who use AI at work anticipate and receive negative evaluations regarding their competence and motivation. Further, we find evidence that these social evaluations affect assessments of job candidates. Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs.
I don’t think that people who use AI tools are idiots. I think that some of my coworkers are idiots and their use of AI has just solidified that belief. They keep pasting AI results to nuanced questions and not validating the response themselves.
I’ve seen lazy developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, and paste them directly into code with no scrutiny, no testing, no validation. I’ve also seen talented developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, verify them, scrutinize them, simplify or expand on them. The difference wasn’t the source of information, but what the developer did with it.
AI is a crutch for the shameless, careless developers who create more problems than they solve. It’s just made them more efficient at it. Which only creates problems faster than than the talented developers can solve; it’s easy to destroy, but difficult to build. I know talented developers who use AI, but it hasn’t made them faster or more efficient, because their strength is also their weakness: they take their time, they evaluate their options, they scrutinize AI output because they know its prone to mistakes.
My greatest worry is the folks in the middle - they’re neither experts nor novices, just average. I want to see more engineers develop the skills needed to make them experts, but I worry that AI will just make them lazy.