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The IKEA effect in the age of AI
I have a drawer at home full of leather offcuts I cannot bring myself to throw away. They are scraps, most of them, the edges trimmed off wallets and card holders I made by hand back when I was teaching myself leathercraft and slowly turning it into a small side business. Objectively they are waste. To me they are the evidence of something. I worked for those scraps, and that work changed how I see them.
If you have ever kept a wonky mug a child made, or refused to bin a piece of furniture you built badly, you already know the feeling I am describing.
And there is a name for it.
A quick note before I go further. I am not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, just a writer who makes things and reads widely. What follows is reflection on a handful of studies, most of them observational or small, not advice about how you should work or think.
The IKEA effect is the tendency to place a disproportionately high value on things you helped make. It was named and documented by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely in a 2012 paper with the lovely title “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love”. Across four studies using IKEA boxes, origami and Lego, people consistently rated their own clumsy creations as “similar in value to experts’ creations”.
The number that tends to get repeated comes from the first experiment in the paper. Builders bid an average of $0.78 for the plain storage boxes they had assembled themselves, while non-builders bid an average of $0.48 for the identical pre-built box, a premium of roughly 63 percent.
The authors are blunt about it. They write that “labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor: even constructing a standardized bureau, an arduous, solitary task, can lead people to overvalue their (often poorly constructed) creations”. Note the “can.” This is a tendency, not a law.
And there is one important catch, and it matters for where I am going. The effect only showed up when the labor succeeded. When people failed to finish, or built something and then took it apart, the extra value vanished. Effort that goes nowhere does not buy attachment. Completed effort does.
Now sit that next to the thing reshaping how a lot of us work. Generative AI is, broadly, a labor remover. It takes much of the cognitive grind out of writing, coding, summarising, drafting. Or at least it’s supposed to. The output arrives, often decent, and the effort that used to produce it simply did not happen.
If the IKEA effect is right that we love what we labor over, the obvious question is what we feel about what we did not labor over at all.
A 2025 study looked at this. In “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, researchers had 54 people write essays using an LLM, a search engine, or nothing but their own heads, while measuring brain activity. The people who leaned on the LLM reported the lowest sense of ownership over what they had written, and showed the weakest brain connectivity of the three groups. Many of them struggled to quote back the essay they had just produced.
And this seems to show up on the other side too: not just in how creators feel about AI-assisted work, but in how audiences judge it. In a 2023 study, “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork”, researchers found that people tended to prefer artworks they believed were human-made over artworks they believed were AI-made. Part of that preference came down to the qualities people associated with human creation: intention, emotion, effort, and a sense that someone was actually behind the work.
That matters because the Ikea effect is not really about furniture. It is about ownership. We do not only value the finished object. We value the effort we believe went into it. And when that effort feels absent — whether we are the maker or the audience — something in the value seems to drop.
I notice this in my own days. I use AI for parts of my writing work: the research, the lookup, the first-pass structuring, the awkward sentence I cannot quite untangle. But the pieces I feel most attached to are still the ones where I had to wrestle with the idea myself. The ones where I got annoyed, deleted half of it, walked away, came back, and finally found the line I was looking for.
The other risk here is not just that AI-made things feel less ours. It is that the effort we skip might have been doing something for us beyond producing the object.
A 2025 study by Michael Gerlich found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking. This one study so but put beside the IKEA finding about failed labor and a pattern suggests itself. The value, in both the products study and our own heads, seems to live in the completed effort, not the finished result. Skip the effort and you may keep the result while losing what the effort was quietly building.
I do not buy the idea that AI is something to refuse. I use it. It is genuinely useful. What the leather drawer and the writing work both tell me is that the value was never really in the object. It was in the doing.
So the practical move, for me at least, is not to do everything the hard way out of nostalgia. It is to be deliberate about which labor I keep. Let the machine carry the parts that are pure friction with no learning in them. Hold onto the parts where the effort is the point, where struggling through is what builds the skill or the judgment or the sense that the thing is mine.
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