AI Grief at Work: Development and Initial Validation of a Self-Report Scale

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can take away valued parts of work, such as learning through one's own effort or the sense that a result is one's own. I define AI grief as sadness and longing related to what generative AI takes away from people's lives and present a self-report scale of AI grief at work. In a preregistered online survey, 304 adults, nearly all employed and mostly in the UK, rated how often they had 15 such experiences in the past month. The items formed one strong scale with a dominant general factor, which justifies a single total score. AI grief experiences were on average infrequent. Scores were associated with the number of losses that participants attributed to AI and were related to, but distinguishable from, anxiety, depression, and fear of AI. Their negative association with acceptance of AI was stronger than predicted. The scale needs confirmation in an independent sample.