Negative perceptions of outsourcing to artificial intelligence

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools become increasingly integrated into daily life, people are beginning to outsource not only professional tasks but also socio-relational ones. Large language models like ChatGPT can generate wedding vows, speeches, and personal messages, raising questions about how individuals who use AI for such tasks are perceived by others. In this paper, we conduct six pre-registered studies with British participants (N = 3935) to understand how people view those who expend less effort by outsourcing tasks to AI in different ways. We highlight a tradeoff between efficiency and inferred moral character, authenticity, and value: outsourcing makes us think more negatively about not only the person and their motivations, but also the outsourced work itself. Importantly, this effect is not uniform. Reduced effort does not consistently lead to domain-general negative character perceptions across all tasks, but has particularly negative effects for outsourcing socio-relational tasks. Our results suggest that reduced effort is important not only because people value time and energy spent, but because expending less effort through outsourcing signals second-order perceptions that people are being less authentic and care less about the task. Our research highlights how relying on AI shapes our perceptions of the user, raising key philosophical questions about efficiency, authenticity, and social ties in a world filled with AI-mediated interactions.