Distrust and disillusionment toward generative artificial intelligence: Psychodramatic exploration of employee trust in organizational technology acceptance

Abstract Millions have adopted tools like ChatGPT in recent years, yet indifference and resistance among employees remain. This qualitative study employs monodramatic projective techniques to explore employees' hidden assumptions and unconscious beliefs in a division attempting to integrate Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI, GAI). Through pretensive work, soliloquy, symbolic representation, modeling with intermediate objects, concretization, and role reversal techniques, the interviewees' internal representations of GAI and trust were materialized in physical artifacts, such as a ball of straw or a potted plant. The study identified three principal themes: GAI's appearance as a Janus-faced presence, unmet performance promises, and avoided proximity. Findings highlight ambiguities in acceptance and show that adoption was driven more by industry hype and normative pressures than genuine organizational needs, leading to disorganized implementation dependent on individual employee characteristics, mistrust, and disenchantment. The study's main contribution lies in refining human-robot interaction (HRI) models and psychodrama methods for GAI, emphasizing the significance of physicality and embodiment in technology-mediated relationships, identifying trust as a complex phenomenon with potential reciprocal causation, and emphasizing the importance of affective attitudes, illustrating how adoption projects can falter despite cognitive openness – all insights crucial for understanding self-driven, bottom-up GAI adaptation in an organizational context.