Leveraging AI Tools to Express Gratitude

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the way people engage in everyday tasks, including helping with emotional labor. Here, we ask whether AI can effectively assist people in preparing written expressions of the social emotion of gratitude while maintaining the subjective well-being and relational benefits of that practice. In Study 1, participants (N = 246) randomly assigned to an AI-modified version of a gratitude letter task report levels of gratitude, subjective well-being, and relational closeness that are not statistically different than those who manually wrote a gratitude letter. In a subset of participants (n = 115), both groups showed increases in well-being from baseline to post-task. In Study 2, third-party readers (N = 522) rated the AI-generated letters as more authentic expressions of gratitude than the human-generated letters. Further, they tended to believe the AI letters were written by humans. This work presents a novel integration of AI to generate written output, traditionally produced by participants, in a positive activity intervention, extending the application of AI in this area. Importantly, doing so maintained the benefits of the gratitude letter task for participant well-being, suggesting that AI can be leveraged in thoughtful ways to reduce participant burden without sacrificing activity efficacy.