A Costly Co-Pilot? AI Usage Signals Reduced Morality via Effort Perceptions

Artificial intelligence has spread rapidly across life domains. While the discourse about AI risks and benefits gained public traction, little is known about interpersonal perceptions of AI users. Across four studies in three countries (N = 1,219), we compared judgments about individuals using AI to complete a task with individuals completing the task without AI assistance. Robust and large effects emerged across samples, indicating lower moral character judgment for AI users, lowered cooperation partner attractiveness, and lower attributed outcome deservingness. All effects were functions of differences in effort perception, indicating that lower perceived effort accounted for the detrimental effects of AI usage. In sum, the use of AI for completing a task was rated considerably more negatively when compared to completing it without AI. We discuss implications and constraints to generalizability and foreshadow potential drifts in perception along the normalization of AI tools.