Rama investigates how technologies influence the identities and practices of vulnerable working communities, designing ways to enhance their work outcomes both in the United States and worldwide. As a mixed-methods researcher, he has made academic contributions in reputed venues such as CHI, CSCW, ICTD, and COMPASS. Rama also actively collaborates with NGOs (Teach for India, Karya) and companies (Google, Microsoft Research), fostering meaningful community impact in conjunction with his scholarly endeavors.
Research News
Rivalry and Collaboration Attitudes: NYU Study Finds Writers Need Both to Thrive in the Age of AI
When a screenwriter told New York University researchers last year that letting AI do her work would make her "miserable inside," she was onto something.
A follow-up study from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and Stern School of Business finds that the instinct to compete with generative AI, rather than simply embrace it, is associated with meaningful long-term benefits for writing professionals.
The catch: rivalry alone isn't enough either.
The 2026 study, led by Rama Adithya Varanasi, a postdoctoral researcher in Tandon's Technology, Management and Innovation Department, alongside Tandon Professor Oded Nov, and Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld, a professor of management at Stern, surveyed 403 professional writers across marketing, publishing, education, and the arts. Findings will be presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this month.
The work extends a 2025 qualitative study by the same team, which interviewed 25 experienced writers and introduced the concept of "AI rivalry" — the idea that some writers proactively compete against AI rather than simply avoid it, targeting what they see as its weaknesses, such as its difficulty producing content rooted in specific communities or geographies.
The new research asked a larger question: what actually happens to writers' careers, skills, and satisfaction depending on how they orient themselves toward AI?
The study finds risks at both extremes. Writers who reported strong collaborative attitudes toward AI also reported higher short-term productivity and job satisfaction, but invested less in maintaining their own skills — the risk of over-reliance.
Writers who perceived AI as a rival reported stronger skill maintenance and greater investment in peer relationships, but that perception showed no significant association with productivity or satisfaction — the risk of under-reliance.
"The concern isn't that workers use AI," said Varanasi. "It's that they stop developing the capabilities that make humans irreplaceable. What this study tells managers is that they can't measure success purely by output. If the workflow removes the need for human judgment, the skill atrophies and that cost doesn't show up until it's too late."
Notably, rivalry attitudes didn't reflect a rejection of the technology. The data showed these writers reported more experience with generative AI than those who held neither orientation strongly. They studied the AI competition, rather than ignoring it.
The most striking result came from writers who scored high on both orientations simultaneously. This group showed the strongest associations with job crafting and skill maintenance across nearly every dimension measured, and posted productivity levels closer to the pure collaboration group — though satisfaction remained higher among pure collaborators — without sacrificing the long-term skill maintenance that pure collaborators showed less of.
"What surprised us is that rivalry and collaboration don't cancel each other out," said Wiesenfeld. "Writers who hold both orientations seem to use AI more deliberately. They get the productivity benefits without outsourcing the judgment."
The study is among the first to measure this tradeoff across a broad set of outcomes — relationships, tasks, cognition, skills, satisfaction, and productivity — drawing on expertise in both human-computer interaction and organizational behavior.
The implications for employers are direct. Organizations that push widespread AI adoption to boost efficiency may be optimizing for the wrong thing, particularly if those workflows come at the cost of workers practicing core human skills.
"Most organizations right now are still developing policies on how employees should relate to AI. " said Nov. "Our findings suggest that the relationship workers have with AI matters as much as whether they use it."
The researchers call for a new design structure that builds productive "friction" into AI tools, calibrating how much assistance is offered based on a user's reliance attitudes rather than defaulting to maximum engagement.
The team's next phase will test that concept directly. They are building prototypes of AI tools designed to promote appropriate reliance, and plan to expand the research beyond writing to other creative professions including game developers, graphic designers, and visual artists.
Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation.
"Rivalry as a Craft": NYU study reveals how writers compete with AI
Writers are not passive victims of AI disruption but active crafters of their professional futures, according to new research from New York University presented at The ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan.
Generative AI technologies are transforming the writing profession, eliciting opposing reactions. "If I let AI do my work, it would make me miserable inside," one screenwriter told researchers, while a paralegal countered, "individuals who are not using it are at a serious disadvantage."
The study was overseen by NYU Tandon's Oded Nov (Morton L. Topfer Professor of Technology Management) with lead author Rama Adithya Varanasi (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU Tandon) and Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld (Professor of Management at NYU Stern). The team interviewed 25 professional writers with an average of 17 years of experience, all with at least 12 months of exposure to generative AI.
Using 'job crafting' theory, which examines how workers redesign their roles to derive greater meaning from their work, the researchers identified four distinct strategies that writing professionals employ in response to generative AI — two focused on resistance and two on adoption.
- Human-driven expansion (AI Resisters): Writers strengthen their identity by making their human labor visible, building personal brands, and forming collaborations.
- Human-driven localization (AI Resisters): Writers create niche identities, appeal to selective audiences that value human work, and sometimes reduce quality to compete with AI's speed.
- Generative AI-driven expansion (AI Adopters): Writers use AI to enhance creative workflows, generate alternatives, overcome blocks, and assist with challenging communications.
- Generative AI-driven delegation (AI Adopters): Writers offload tedious tasks to AI, reduce emotional labor, and minimize dependencies on colleagues.
The research uncovered significant evidence of "AI rivalry" among some resistors — professionals actively competing against AI rather than simply avoiding it. Writers employing resistance strategies deliberately target what they perceive as AI's weaknesses, such as its limited ability to generate content specific to a geographic area, community, or context.
"I'm taking steps to be more independent," one SEO writer shared. "I have started 11 websites. The baking website is my best contender." Many writers are creating revenue streams where they own the content, anticipating industry disruption.
Meanwhile, adopters engage in significant "AI managerial labor" — the invisible work of designing prompts, cleaning outputs, and verifying results. This requires substantial workflow changes, as one paralegal noted: "With ChatGPT, I need to block two to three hours to complete the prompting... If I leave it mid-way... it is extremely difficult to follow the reasoning."
Economic implications loom large, as some senior professionals eliminated dependencies on junior writers. "The difference now is that I'm not dealing with a lot of writers; I'm not giving them therapy sessions," said one publishing house owner who replaced staff with ChatGPT.
A key distinction emerged: resisters shape both identities and practices, while adopters focus primarily on practices without significant identity work. This stems from AI's anthropomorphizing features, which some writers perceive as competing with their creative identities.
Varanasi emphasized: "Resistors engage holistically in their human potential to shape both identity and practices... We introduced the notion of AI rivalry to show resistors engaged in constructive strategies while viewing generative AI as a rival similar to how they would treat a human rival."
The researchers recommend creating communities where resisters and embracers can share insights, as both groups would benefit from understanding each other's approaches to navigating this technological transformation.
The research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
Varanasi, R., Wiesenfeld, B. & Nov, O. AI Rivalry as a Craft: How Resisting and Embracing Generative AI Are Reshaping the Writing Profession. 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (1198). https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714035