CONCEPT
Efficacy Inflation
The specific psychological mechanism by which AI tools produce amplified accomplishment that is experientially indistinguishable from personal capability — producing genuine competence on the output and structural vulnerability on the identity.
Efficacy inflation is the mechanism through which AI tools inflate the third dimension of Maslach's framework — personal accomplishment — in ways that are both accurate and misleading. The inflation is accurate because the output exists, works, and serves a purpose: the worker has accomplished something real. The inflation is misleading because the accomplishment is partly the tool's, not hers, and the distinction between personal efficacy and system efficacy collapses in the subjective experience of the interaction. The natural-language interface eliminates the cognitive markers that would otherwise remind the worker of the tool's contribution, and every subsequent feedback mechanism — colleague recognition, metric capture, managerial evaluation — confirms the inflated self-assessment from external direction as well.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The inflation operates through the interface's transparency. When previous tools required translation — learning a programming language, mastering a framework, navigating technical constraints — the translation served as continuous reminder that output was a joint product. The friction of translation was