Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol 77(2), Jun 2025, 118-130; doi:10.1037/cpb0000284
Along with providing extraordinary benefits, artificial intelligence (AI) poses risks of harm to people. This article focuses on two ethical concerns with AI that are of particular concern to consulting and industrial–organizational psychologists: harm to people’s well-being and harm to interpersonal relationships. AI has the ability to affect people’s perceptions and experiences when they interact with each other in AI-mediated communication by rewriting and autocorrecting people’s writing, changing physical appearances, and redirecting people’s attention to information or ideas that could marginalize or create bias against people. AI is also able to influence people’s ways of thinking and feeling in human–AI interaction. It can cause them to react more positively or negatively to information and to anthropomorphize AI using different types of imagery and language patterns. When AI is used in automated performance-management platforms, it can direct employees to work harder and longer than they want to and cause harm through stress and burnout. Many codes of ethics require consultants and professionals to take reasonable steps to avoid harming the clients and people with whom they work and to minimize harm where it is foreseeable and unavoidable. This article identifies how these AI capabilities may cause harm to individual, interpersonal, and group well-being even when the same AI may also provide positive contributions. It provides guidance for consulting and industrial–organizational psychologists to research, create, and deploy AI in healthy ways and mitigate harm to employees. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)