According to Self-Determination Theory, human well-being depends on the ability of each person's environment to support their basic psychological needs (BPNs) for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The rise of AI and its permeation into human communication increasingly make AI part of that environment. So far, limited work in NLP has leveraged Self-Determination Theory and the concept of BPNs. In this work, we argue that Self-Determination Theory poses a promising framework to extract the antecedents of human well-being from text by considering its commonalities with previously employed emotion theories and by reviewing the surrounding literature. In addition, we argue for AI-mediated communication as a target domain, given the centrality of relationships for BPN satisfaction and the possibility of shaping the field through targeted LLM development. We then outline ten challenges on the path to need-aware, AI-augmented communication.

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