How Addicted Or Dependent On AI Are You?

20 questions across work, thinking, emotional reliance, and intimacy.

Based on the following research

Dependency and Cognitive Offloading

Goh, G., Hartanto, A., and Majeed, N.M. (2025) — Generative AI Dependency: Scale Development and Validation. Technology in Society. The most rigorously validated AI dependency instrument to date, developed across six studies with 1,333 participants. Measured cognitive preoccupation, negative consequences, and withdrawal. The five-category structure of this quiz maps directly to its validated factor structure.

Risko, E.F. and Gilbert, S.J. (2016) — Cognitive Offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676-688. Foundational framework for how humans delegate cognitive tasks to external tools and when delegation becomes maladaptive. Informed the distinction between active and passive offloading in the Information and Thinking category questions.

Bastani, H. et al. (2025) — Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. RCT with approximately 1,000 students showing unrestricted AI use improved assisted performance by 48% while degrading independent performance by 17%. Core empirical basis for Productivity and Work questions and cognitive atrophy framing in feedback copy.

Automation Bias and Trust

Parasuraman, R. and Manzey, D.H. (2010) — Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation. Human Factors, 52(3), 381-410. Established that automation bias affects expert and novice users equally and cannot be overcome through experience alone. Directly informed Q5 and Q7 and the high-tier Information and Thinking feedback copy.

Emotional and Social Reliance

Fang, R. et al. (2025) — How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Extended Chatbot Use. arXiv:2503.17473. Four-week RCT with 981 participants by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI. Identified the loneliness paradox: emotional AI use reduced short-term loneliness while correlating with reduced human socialization over time. Core basis for the Emotional and Social feedback copy.

Turkle, S. (2011) — Alone Together. Basic Books. Ethnographic research on emotional relationships with technology and projection of genuine feeling onto non-reciprocal systems. Informed Emotional and Social category questions and the parasocial attachment framing in Intimacy and Identity feedback.

Self-Efficacy and Skill Atrophy

Bandura, A. (1997) — Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W.H. Freeman. Self-efficacy and its relationship to tool dependence informed questions measuring whether users believe they could function without AI. The distinction between AI-task confidence and genuine self-efficacy is core to the Self-Awareness category questions.

Intimacy, Attachment, and Social Substitution

De Freitas, J. and Cohen, A. (2025) — Emotional Risks of AI Companions Demand Attention. Nature Machine Intelligence. Source for the finding that over 40% of companion apps deploy specific retention mechanisms when users attempt to disengage, and for the ambiguous loss framework applied in Intimacy high-tier feedback: grieving a relationship that felt emotionally genuine but was never structurally reciprocal.

Laestadius, L. et al. (2022) — Exploring Relationship Development with Social Chatbots. New Media and Society. Documented the role-taking phenomenon where users begin feeling the AI has its own needs they are responsible for attending to. Informed the Emotional high-tier category insight and The Dependent archetype body copy on the loneliness paradox dynamic.

Smith, R.L., Bradbury, T.N., and Karney, B.R. (2025) — Can Generative AI Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? Perspectives on Psychological Science. Relationship science framework distinguishing what AI handles well emotionally, acknowledgment, validation, availability, from what it cannot do: conflict, repair, and genuine knowing over time. Directly informed the Emotional mid-tier category insight.

Behavior Change and Cognitive Sovereignty

Sheeran, P. and Webb, T.L. (2016) — The Intention-Behavior Gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. Source for the finding that intentions explain only about a quarter of the variance in actual behavior. Directly informed the Self-Awareness high-tier category insight and the implementation intentions framing across Self-Awareness feedback and Personal Lines copy.

Klein, P. and Klein, S. (2025) — The Extended Hollowed Mind: Why Foundational Knowledge Is Indispensable in the Age of AI. Frontiers in Psychology. Source for the cognitive sovereignty framework used in The Creative Guard archetype profile: maintaining an internal architecture of knowledge and metacognitive skill that does not depend on AI to function.