Employees Fear the Stigma of Using AI at Work, According to a Study

Business owners who want their employees to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) applications and improve how they do their jobs may face a bigger challenge than their staff learning how to use those tools effectively. A new study indicates many workers hesitate to adopt the tech out of concerns colleagues will disdain them as being lazy if they do—and also that those negative perceptions are very much a part of today’s workplace. Researchers at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Management and Organizations determined that many employees attach a considerable degree of stigma to colleagues using AI in the workplace. They found that biases against apps not only dissuade many workers from using them in fear they may be looked down upon by AI-wary colleagues. They discovered that some people who adopted the tech at their jobs got labeled negatively, which affected their workplace status. “Individuals who use AI tools face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from others,” the study’s authors wrote. “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.” The researchers came up with that conclusion after putting 4,400 participants through four different test scenarios. The first case consisted of a group of employees being assigned an AI tech tool. They were then asked to anticipate how colleagues would rate them in terms of laziness, replaceability, competence, and diligence for using the app. They largely expected negative evaluations from coworkers on all four criteria, expecting higher scores than a neutral baseline on laziness and replaceability, and lower results for the rest. To compare those answers, a second scenario asked another cohort of employees for their perceptions of first group members for having used AI, ranking them in terms of laziness, diligence, competence, independence, self-assurance, ambition, and dominance. Their responses were generally as unflattering as members of the initial group had feared–meaning their feared expectations were matched by equally dismal evaluations. Within those two balancing outcomes, researchers found two other important consequences of those biases. First off, people in the group adopting the AI tool reported the expected stigma undermined their willingness to use the tech, and made them less inclined to report having done so to colleagues or managers. Secondly, the negative attitudes attached to people who’d used AI were so strong that they remained constant despite the age, gender, race, or job title of colleagues who’d adopted it. “We found that none of these target demographic attributes influences the effect of receiving Al help on perceptions of laziness, diligence, competence, independence, or self-assuredness,” that study’s authors wrote. “This suggests that the social stigmatization of AI use… appears to be a general one.” The reasons for that negativity aren’t new, the researchers noted. Claims that innovations meant to make work easier or more efficient—like calculators or e-books—are a cop-out to avoid doing the more demanding underlying tasks have been around for decades. And questions about whether reliance on those tools will undermine or even destroy users’ abilities to continue performing the original tasks go way, way back. The authors cited the ancient Greek philosopher Plato asking whether people who embraced “a new invention for learning (writing) would ever develop true wisdom.” But the stigma now attached to AI adopters at work are important for businesses to address. One of the experiments found that managers are similarly basing decisions—including many hiring choices—on their own biases. Many believed that employees or candidates who used AI were somehow lazy, or trying to gain advantages their colleagues. In other words, not only are workers harnessing the power of AI being looked down on, but in some cases they get marginalized for their efforts. The second is how the anti-AI prejudices reversed themselves when use of the tech was described as clearly beneficial and productive for complex projects—or even as a logical and smart way to speed and improve daily tasks. Once their utility was explained, resistance vanished. The contrast suggests business owners who want employees to adopt AI to speed up and improve aspects of their jobs need to create clear, explicit general guidelines for how and when the tech should be used. They’d also be wise to communicate to workers who embrace AI—and those prone to snubbing it—why using those tools is an active effort to enhance results, not a dodge to shirk the work at hand. But as the study’s results suggest, changing those attitudes will require some workplace attitude adjustment. “This apparent tension between AI’s documented benefits and people’s reluctance to use it raises a critical question,” the authors note. “(A)re people who use AI actually evaluated less favorably than people who receive other forms of assistance at work?” BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC