Approximately 88% of organizations around the world implemented artificial intelligence (AI) into at least one business function by the end of 2025, the latest McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI found. Despite promised productivity gains, passive AI use at work, where employees copy-and-paste AI responses to complete tasks, can make people doubt their skills and find their work meaningless, according to a study co-authored by a faculty member from Penn State's Smeal College of Business that published in Scientific Reports.
Using prolific, an internet platform designed to help scientists find research participants, the team recruited about 270 professionals working across human resources, communications and management fields to complete a series of writing tests similar to their day-to-day tasks, both manually and with the help of AI tools. Their study found that AI use - specifically whether participants used AI collaboratively to workshop their own ideas or passively to generate and copy responses - played a significant role in participants' reported scores of self-efficacy, meaningfulness, and psychological ownership. Specifically, passive AI use led to nearly 20% declines in feelings of ownership and 10% declines in perceived meaningfulness, while collaborative AI use showed scores similar to AI-independent work, according to the researchers.
Although AI use has been reported to improve productivity, Yidan Yin, assistant professor of management and organization at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, explained that less is known about the deeper psychological impacts of AI use in the workplace. Yin explained that while scientists have begun exploring possible long-term costs, the field is still quite new, and much of the research is very broad
"Previous studies have primarily looked at the positive impacts AI can have on work productivity, as well as how AI use can make workers feel isolated and less motivated," Yin said. "With this study, though, we really wanted to focus on better understanding how AI use reshapes people's connection to their work."
To accomplish this, the team primarily focused on measuring AI use's impacts on three closely related constructs: self-efficacy, or an individual's confidence in themself to complete a task without AI assistance; work meaningfulness, or how much an individual perceives their work as purposeful and significant; and psychological ownership, or how much ownership individuals feel over their output. The researchers used two additional variables - task enjoyment and outcome satisfaction - to gain a comprehensive view of how AI use impacted participants' psychology, Yin explained.
The researchers built a series of writing tasks tailored to the occupations of participants in the study. In the first task, participants were assigned to one of three conditions and instructed to complete the task either manually without the use of AI, actively collaborate with AI, or passively copy and paste AI-generated responses to complete the task. Participants then answered questions about their feelings of self-efficacy, work meaningfulness and psychological ownership of the output. In the second task, all participants were required to complete the writing task manually without AI assistance, answering the same survey questions afterwards.
"This two-task design made it possible to examine both the immediate effects of different uses of AI and their lingering effects after participants returned to working without AI, all in an experiment that only took about 20 to 30 minutes to complete," Yin said.
Passive AI use during the first task reduced people's feelings of ownership by nearly 20%, and self-efficacy and perceived meaningfulness by nearly 10%, relative to manual writing, whereas collaborative AI use did not differ meaningfully from manual writing. The declines in self-efficacy and meaningfulness persisted after the second task, when all participants returned to manual writing, suggesting that the erosions cannot be easily undone by returning to working without AI assistance.
