The ”Artificial” Colleague: Evaluation of Work Satisfaction in Collaboration with Non-human Coworkers

The advance of "artificial intelligence"-(AI)-based technologies has the potential to transform work tremendously. Work is a major part of life and, thus, its meaningfulness or lack thereof will impact overall well-being. Previous research investigated human-AI collaboration at work mostly with a focus on performance. However, little attention is given to how collaboration with AI influences the meaningfulness of work and job satisfaction. In this paper, we present an online experiment to compare the perception of meaningfulness and relationship to the collaborator across different task distributions and collaborators (human/AI). Our results show that working with a human is more motivating and meaningful compared to working with an AI independent of the task. Moreover, the AI is more often viewed as a subordinate, while the human is perceived as a teammate. These results provide preliminary implications for the design of collaboration with AI that consider job satisfaction.