Dominique Davis, Haley Narita, Cesar Sandoval, Conrad Liszka, Jayden Ramirez de Arellano, & Dr. Weldon Zane Smith
West (2015) stated that as technology advances in intelligence, creativity, and becomes more sophisticated, it will affect several jobs. Artificial intelligence (AI) and its growing workplace integration has the possibilities of both creating and eliminating jobs. Findlay et al. (2017) found that some individuals working in the pharmaceutical industry reported a positive outlook for their job following the workplace’s implementation of robotic installations, while others experienced negative feelings after working alongside robotic technologies. Those negative feelings ultimately lead to faults in job rotation and impacted the individuals’ comfort as newly introduced responsibilities induced feelings of anxiety. Since AI has potential for use in many different fields, it is important to understand how individuals in other jobs feel about its use. The current study will survey individuals of varying ages, jobs, and levels of job satisfaction to investigate differing perceptions of AI threat. Job satisfaction will be measured using the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction at Work Scale (Eriksson & Boman 2018) which has three subscales: autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and the Threats of Artificial Intelligence Scale (Kieslich et al., 2021) will be used to measure perceptions of the threat of AI. The present study implements a manipulation of AI threats through deception informing portions of participants that the scales were either completely written by an AI, or created with the assistance of an AI. The remaining participants receive no such information. The deception allows us to manipulate how personal the usage of AI feels to individuals, so we can investigate how different individuals perceive AI threat in relation to their jobs and job satisfaction. The current study utilized ANOVA to investigate the interaction between job types and deception while controlling for satisfaction levels. Findings demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the effect of different levels of AI manipulation groups on job satisfaction.