The rise of ‘social offloading’—when AI replaces your boss’s empathy

Stop if you’ve heard this one before: an employee received a message from her boss and didn’t quite understand its meaning, suspecting it was written by AI. So, the employee asked an AI tool to interpret the message for her. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss.

The employee paused. “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, vice president of leadership...