If you use AI to help write your performance review, you’ll actually end up giving yourself a lower score.
March 13, 2026
Original Paper
The Effects of AI Assistance on Self-Promotion
SSRN · 6299464
The Takeaway
One would expect AI tools to help people overcome modesty or close the gender gap in self-promotion. Instead, the study found that using AI had the counterintuitive effect of making participants rate their own skills more conservatively than if they had written the text themselves.
From the abstract
Persistent gender gaps in self-promotion contribute to unequal labor market outcomes. In this study, we investigate how AI-assisted writing tools shape self-promotion, and, as a secondary outcome, confidence and how these effects interact with gender. For this purpose, we conducted an online experiment in China in which participants wrote self-promotion texts, provided a numerical self-promotion score and stated their confidence about how they will perform in an upcoming math and logic test. We