Generative AI (GenAI) systems offer unprecedented opportunities for transforming professional and personal work, yet present challenges around prompting, evaluating and relying on outputs, and optimizing workflows. We argue that metacognition$\unicode{x2013}$the psychological ability to monitor and control one's thoughts and behavior$\unicode{x2013}$offers a valuable lens to understand and design for these usability challenges. Drawing on research in psychology and cognitive science, and recent GenAI user studies, we illustrate how GenAI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, requiring a high degree of metacognitive monitoring and control. We propose these demands could be addressed by integrating metacognitive support strategies into GenAI systems, and by designing GenAI systems to reduce their metacognitive demand by targeting explainability and customizability. Metacognition offers a coherent framework for understanding the usability challenges posed by GenAI, and provides novel research and design directions to advance human-AI interaction.

翻译：生成式人工智能系统为变革专业与个人工作提供了前所未有的机遇，但在提示设计、输出评估与依赖以及工作流优化方面仍存在挑战。我们认为，元认知——即监控与调节个体思维及行为的心理能力——为理解并应对这些可用性挑战提供了宝贵视角。基于心理学、认知科学领域研究及近期生成式人工智能用户研究成果，我们阐述了生成式人工智能系统如何向用户施加元认知需求，要求其具备高度元认知监控与调节能力。我们提出，可通过在系统中集成元认知支持策略，以及通过提升可解释性与可定制性来降低系统的元认知需求，从而应对这些挑战。元认知为理解生成式人工智能引发的可用性挑战提供了统一框架，并为推动人机交互发展提供了新颖的研究与设计方向。