The secret cost of using AI tools at work that no one is telling you about

If you think using ChatGPT at work will lead your company to reward you for your AI-first approach, you might be completely off track. A new study has found that workers who use ChatGPT and other AI tools come across as less trustworthy to their managers.

The research was carried out by Samuel Meyers, a PhD student, his adviser Dr Yochanan Bigman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr Roman Briker of WHU—Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. According to the study published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly, bosses do not trust employees who rely on artificial intelligence for their daily tasks.

The team carried out six studies and analysed how using large language models (LLMs) influences how they are evaluated at work and whether their managers have any trust in them.

Managers do not trust employees who use ChatGPT to finish their work

A group of participants was asked to act like supervisors and were asked if they trusted an employee's claim of spending a set number of hours on their work, or would they rather verify it themselves. They were also told whether the person had used AI to complete it or if he did it himself. The results showed that people who completed their work without AI had a 68 per cent chance of earning their manager's trust. However, those who used AI had just a 24 per cent chance.

What's striking is that they did not base their decision on the quality of work, but on how it was done and whether AI was used. This shows that AI influenced how much trust a manager had in his employee.

They also compared AI-assisted work with work copied from someone. In this case, AI won over plagiarism. Further analyses showed that less trustworthiness influenced how the employee was evaluated during performance reviews. They were also seen as someone who did not contribute as much to the company's growth, and weren't deemed suitable for promotion either.

"An employee may use AI to produce better work more efficiently yet still lose their manager's trust simply because AI was involved," Bigman said. He added that "organisations need to recognise that adopting AI is not just a technological challenge; it is also a psychological and managerial one."

However, they also found that companies that trustworthiness changed depending on whether the company encouraged the use of AI. If this was the case, the employers were likely to have more trust in the staff. However, if AI was not allowed at work, the managers are less likely to trust those who are found using it.