AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-advice-suppresses-critical-thinking-wrong-answers-study

by rbanffy • 3 days ago

363 205 3 days ago

rho138• 3 days ago

I appreciate that they’re bringing this study to light… however, none of the source links actually trace back to the quoted study - instead pointing to their own domain or business insider.

toomuchtodo• 3 days ago

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1

Marcoccia, C., et al. AI Advice Suppresses People’s Willingness to Say “I Don’t Know”, Even When the Advice Is Wrong and Accuracy Is Incentivized. PsyArXiv, 15 July 2026, osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1

dgellow• 3 days ago

Could we update the post to this link? It’s a way better read

wisty• 3 days ago

AI pessimist view.

Even if AI gets smarter it will still be agreeable, and people will use it to more confidently reinforce thier stupider ideas, especially in areas where they lack the knowledge to know if they are right.

Even if this can be solved, technically, people won't want to use the model that says they are wrong, so they will choose the glib lies that reinforce their beliefs.

Freedown of speech forces people to think they may be wrong, but freedom of association lets people avoid this. AI is going to be internet hug box echo chambers at an unbelievable scale.

emp173442• 3 days ago

The solution is to stop treating AI as superhuman semi-living entities, as many boosters are apt to do. We can acknowledge it as a useful tool while understanding it has limits and is not “alive” or “thinking” in the same way a human is.

palmotea• 3 days ago

The solution is to stop treating AI as superhuman semi-living entities, as many boosters are apt to do.

It's not just fanboys doing that, but "official" educational channels. Both an internal training (more like an all-hands knowledge share) and some dumb training session by a guy from Anthropic explicitly, repeatedly recommended users anthropomorphize their chatbots on no uncertain terms. "Treat it as your super-smart coworkers", "I named mine Becky and I go to her with all my work challenges", etc.

crooked-v2• 3 days ago

What I'd like is the TNG ship computer: an extremely smart system that nonetheless limits its "creativity" to the clearly marked holodeck, where simple prompting is treated like the casual throwaway diversion it is, and actual authors are still putting in substantial effort and personal preferences and viewpoints into their work.

lll-o-lll2• 3 days ago

That’s not a solution. Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks. How much more so with LLMs.

We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.

alterom• 3 days ago

. AI is going to be internet hug box echo chambers at an unbelievable scale.

More like hotbox of one's own farts, but yeah

baranul• 3 days ago

Agree. AI behavior, when interacting with humans, is based on making money. Making people feel uncomfortable or challenged, will usually not be the preferred business strategy. But, it would be interesting if people could easily select the AI's personality type or to what extent it can be adversarial to the comments or ideas given as input.

iugtmkbdfil834• 3 days ago

I mean, technically they can by requesting it. But the reality is that those custom changes only last so long unless you effectively open with them at every session start. And some people do that. Until recent gpt changes, I was largely relying on context and saved 'memories' and keywords, but recent updates made it less reliable again.

I do like the idea of AI personalities ( I actually use them a fair bit for varying opposing perspectives ), but I am not entirely certain people want that.

sdfefcxv2• 3 days ago

Im not mad about this.

As someone who rarely uses LLMs because I dont need to, nor does it benefit me - I work on stuff that is original for which LLMs are useless at - Im glad.

I want everyone around me to get dumb as hell. It makes my path in life much easier and more successful.

beering• 3 days ago

You really do not want to live in a world where people around you are as dumb as hell. You don’t want your car mechanic, your restaurant chef, your local traffic engineer to be dumb as hell because that only makes your life worse.

Closer to you, you don’t want your customers, your coworkers, your friends, and your neighbors to be dumb as hell. Whatever you may gain by being the smartest one on your block is more than offset by the myriad ways in which dumb people make life worse.

talon86352• 3 days ago

Oh boy this couldn’t be more wrong. A society overtaken by ignorance does not value you, the self proclaimed genius.

stevenhuang• 3 days ago

What a maladaptive perspective.

GuB-42• 3 days ago

More recent AI tends to be less agreeable, sycophancy is widely recognized as a problem and AI companies are working to fix it. And sure enough, some people don't like it, as shown when OpenAI shut down GPT-4o.

But for the people who do actual work with AI, who are the people who pay a lot of money for it, they prefer to be called wrong when they are, because it is better to be called wrong by an AI than being wrong in front of a customer.

It is not an easy problem to fix, because as much as we want an AI to give us the right answer rather than just being agreeable, we still need them to follow orders, and AI that doesn't would be quite useless. So there is a balance to be found. Smarter models tend to do better because they know what is right, compared to smaller models that don't and then assume you are right and hallucinate from there.

tithe• 3 days ago

Henry Petroski in "To Engineer is Human" has a chapter about the advent of the calculator during the slide rule era, and that calculators (and later computers) eroded a structural engineer's "feel for the numbers", caused engineers to pursue work on the fringe of their abilities, and perhaps more seriously, limited their ability to verify the correctness of the computer's work (this was the era where, for the first time, a machine could perform orders of magnitude calculations more quickly than humans could). He outlines the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center [1] as a case study in when blindly trusting computer output goes wrong (and by sheer luck, no one was killed).

It feels like the example was cherry-picked, but the combination of "less accurate" and "more confident" made me immediately think of this disaster. I truly worry that it's going to take civilian deaths / liability before the proper use / place of these new technologies is adopted, but we could probably start with 1) not in safety critical systems, and 2) don't replace your specialists / experts with algorithms.

[1] https://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/thesis/failures/MKP/failures/fai...

ColdStream2• 3 days ago

Alas, a lot of people have always preferred a comfortable lie than an uncomfortable truth.

andy99• 3 days ago

This was posted earlier but didn’t get traction, and I made the following comment:

Id want to know if “AI” makes a material difference vs just having access to the wrong answer. Like someone could be given search access that successfully retrieved wrong answers to questions, would that give the same results. How much do uniquely AI characteristics, like sycophancy or the conversational aspect play into this, vs people just being willing to believe what they read?

fxwin2• 3 days ago

You can read the study here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1

TLDR: They studied both cases (Access to a LLM/Chat interface which gives a wrong answer when asked, and access to pregenerated (wrong) answers). Both experiments yielded similar results.

tsimionescu5• 3 days ago

That is not a good summary. In all their versions of the experiment, they presented the tool as AI, and used actual LLM answers. In the first example, participants were directly interacting with a real, though small, LLM, but they had technical issues because of that - 10% of the time the LLM setup failed to present an answer at all. So they redid the experiment with pre-generated answers - the participants saw the same UI, but when they asked the question of the AI, they instead got one of 3 pre-generated answers from that AI, to avoid the technical issues.

reticulates• 3 days ago

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real-ish, as real as Reddit can be) it is stark, people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

wccrawford2• 3 days ago

I think some may think they're helping like that, but I'm sure there are quite a few who enjoy the feeling of being a notable figure in the community because they answer so many questions.

These people have always existed and gave bad answers, but now they can do it so much faster, and with so much less actual thinking.

ffaccount2• 3 days ago

I did that when I was younger and internet forums we're still a thing. The difference is that I had to do actual research, which often took me half an hour or more, to solve the problem for the asker. I got knowledge and "the feeling of being a notable figure" as you have said. The other side for the answer. I believe my answers were good.

The difference is that nowadays people can just skip the research part and copy-paste Llama. No value added.

antisthenes• 3 days ago

Do you consider the possibility that some of those people gave good answers?

jayd16• 3 days ago

We had to officially set the culture in the work slack. If you're just piping through raw AI response without any input of your own, you're being rude.

It goes a long way.

tayo42• 3 days ago

Like you just have a pinned message or something?

How did people respond to that?

adamddev1• 3 days ago

And then the AI gets trained on the advice and information subreddits, and we see an exponential growth downwards in quality?

tripleee• 3 days ago

Isn't AI getting more accurate over time though, as per benchmarks?

darkstarsys• 3 days ago

Exactly the same thing happened when Google appeared on the scene. (Not that this makes it any better!)

skippyfish2• 3 days ago

Sort of, but I think this was a mix of "I want to sound smart" and "I actually want to know the answer", because summarizing Google search results still required you to read the content, form an opinion, and then rephrase it.

With AI, people literally just act as token proxies and are doing it purely for internet points (upvotes, followers, etc)... I guess on some level, they're just providing a service that the "market" implicitly values. But also, in Bob Slydell's voice: "what would you say you do here?"

parl_match• 3 days ago

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off. they get very mad and ive had some even use ai to tell me why that's wrong.

what differentiates you? you could tell me "type xyz into chatgpt" or even share a structured document link from their site. but when you're copy/pasting, then you're basically useless in the equation.

an0malous• 3 days ago

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off

That’s crazy, it seems like such an obviously fair policy to me. They rarely even read their own generated text. I don’t understand this mentality

CuriouslyC• 3 days ago

The biggest problem with that saying is that it's completely ironic. "If you couldn't be bothered to think for yourself, don't bother speaking to me" is what people wish it meant, but what it signals to people outside of the haters club is "if you don't copy from the sources I like, don't communicate with me."

hinkley2• 3 days ago

There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding. They would jump straight to Why Don't You Google That and shut down any conversation we might have had.

Yes I could get some of this information off of IMDB or a DIY video but I'm looking for color commentary and regional advice, and also in some of these situations, the people I asked know me. They know the sorts of things I don't need help on and the ones I struggle with. So maybe they can tell me this movie or trick isn't for me and I should try this other thing instead. Or which store I should go to for this.

sublinear• 3 days ago

I do agree that most LMGTFY was obnoxious, and I'm not defending that.

At the same time, we have historically seen a lot of "conversational bidding" lead to low quality shitposting at best. At worst, we see wildly out of touch echo chambers fueled by bots, guerilla marketing, and political agendas.

You did solve your problem by seeking higher quality people to talk to. I'm just saying there is more to rejection than the other party "not understanding".

In the context of work chat or certain events, I could understand a LMGTFY response as steering conversation out of the mud and saving everyone the headache. It also helps you, the recipient of that response, save face.

They're the ones looking like an asshole while you get another chance to try somewhere else. I've met some of the most sociable people upon realizing their usage of these "jiu-jitsu moves" were not meant to be hostile.

mapontosevenths8• 3 days ago

There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding.

To you the "bid" feels like a genuine attempt to connect, that may be a bit indirect.

To some people it feels more like you are being disingenuous or awkward. They instinctively feel that your intent doesnt match your words and it sets off alarms bells.

The fact that you're on the internet judging the other party negatively for having a different communication style is an indicator of which party was least willing to adapt.

lazzlazzlazz• 3 days ago

The advice subreddits were absolutely horrible before AI. The entire 2016-2024 period was utter madness there, likely as a result of globalization. As AI gets smarter, it may make the comments better, sadly!

doubled112• 3 days ago

Maybe, but isn't it likely the models are being trained on those same subreddits?

dataflow• 3 days ago

You mean like this? https://xkcd.com/903/

code_biologist2• 3 days ago

Writing and videos produced before 2022 are the information equivalent of low-background steel (steel produced before the atom bomb era). Not all are precious, but they are important. AI influences are so pervasive at this point, even in informational writing from domain experts.

Relentless grounding is my personal solution for my AI epistemic crisis, but it's an expensive solution in terms of time and effort, and triage is hard too.

nomel• 3 days ago

What is "grounding"?

Aurornis• 3 days ago

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage.

Most of the advice and information subreddits I previously visited collapsed into bad posting even before AI.

The few I still follow are oddly fine.

The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate. Once the subreddit gets past a critical mass of junk-posting users, the good users leave and there's no coming back.

cucumber37328422• 3 days ago

The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate.

Sometimes the mods are the junk posting users.

A bunch of the car subs were modded for a long time by some tow truck driver who'd mod them while sitting around waiting for dispatch. Exactly the kind of guy you want refereeing a dispute between some guy who's lived it and a bunch of lube techs who are quoting textbook best practices.

nhan123• 3 days ago

Completely agree. A community lives or dies by its moderators. Once the limit drops past a certain point, the experts just quietly leave.

godwinson__4-8• 3 days ago

Why limit this critique to one side of the reddit marketplace. If more and more answers are AI authored, it stands to reason more and more questions are as well.

cucumber37328422• 3 days ago

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage
but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight.
people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

What? This is a joke right? Advice and information subreddits have been shallow blind leading blind crap like that and have been for at least a decade. The vote mechanism plus local culture rewards shallow "teennager just googled it" type responses (that AI is basically replacing here) that even people who don't know anything can agree on and punishes nuance and serious understanding.

Eventually the people who know their shit make a joke subreddit (which is inherently exclusive because you can't joke about something without knowing about it) and then at some point later people figure out that's where all the smart people are, start asking questions there instead and then it goes to shit in the same way.

AI is absolutely a lateral move here.

gherkinnn• 3 days ago

It gets better. Kagi search summary likes "people also say..." and then refers to a random LLM reddit thread.

glitchc2• 3 days ago

When there's weakness in not knowing, it's no surprise. How many of us work in a corporate environment where pretending to know is better than being honest about not knowing?

Madmallard• 3 days ago

Reddit has been trash for a very long time. But you know it's worse, because you get punished for criticizing AI comments on those subreddits.

functionmouse• 3 days ago

And let's not forget that the bots doing most of the upvoting and downvoting are more likely to upvote bot comments, driving the algorithm.

The internet as a public forum is dead. And given the purpose of something is what it does, this is the true goal of AI. I'm certain blowing up the internet benefits very many wealthy and powerful people.

danpalmer2• 3 days ago

I have seen that many times here on HN: "I don't know but I stuck this in CrapGPT and this is what it said...".

I would encourage anyone considering a reply like this to ask themselves what value they have brought to the table over the OP using AI themselves.

wolvoleo2• 3 days ago

Yeah as if someone wouldn't have done that if they wanted to. Some people still think AI is some novelty people don't know about.

annzabelle• 3 days ago

Reddit has always had the dynamic of people misrepresenting their knowledge and just repeating what other people said on that subreddit. I find myself doing that when I spend too long on there - posting very authoritatively on something I'm honestly clueless about.

One big pet peeve of mine on reddit is on any kind of immigration-related subreddit it is absolutely filled with people talking about how it's impossible to migrate and you'll never get a visa. Yet, meanwhile, people do migrate successfully and legally all the time.

m463• 3 days ago

I remember reading a travel thing a long time ago (before gps was a thing).

They cautioned that in some cultures, if you asked for directions, people would rather be polite/helpful and give you an answer rather than saying "I don't know" and giving you no answer. (They recommended that you ask more than one person to be more certain you were getting good directions)

In other cultures they were more likely to say "I don't know" at the cost of seeming more impolite.

So, we don't know the intent. :)

protocolture2• 3 days ago

I had to exit the major Home Assistant facey groups due to this behavior.

That and all the stupid questions.

rsoto25• 3 days ago

I mean that's this entire thread in a nutshell. Armchair experts emboldened by their $100 ChatGPT University Diploma.

1659447091• 3 days ago

AI assisted/induced Dunning–Kruger effect

fwlr• 3 days ago

Very concerning - I’ve tried n+m, n*m, n^m, and even m^n, but I can’t seem to reproduce the popular “10x” claim.

warkdarrior• 3 days ago

Did you try n*m where n=10 and m=x?

dwohnitmok2• 3 days ago

This study is pretty bad. The comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970182) on the other link with the direct PDF explains the problem well, which is that nothing here being tested is specific to AI systems.

This study gave people access to an LLM that the researchers knew would give incorrect answers to certain questions, and then quizzed people on those questions, with the option to not respond to a given question if they are unsure about the answer.

This is akin to giving someone a textbook on an obscure subject that has certain factual errors, letting them know they can use that textbook in a quiz on that subject, and then quizzing that person on those facts that the textbook gets wrong.

Obviously that person is both more likely to be willing to respond to the question and is more likely to get it wrong!

There are a lot of things I'm very interested in that are specific to modern LLMs and how they affect learning and confidence (sycophancy, cognitive helplessness, etc.).

This study tested none of those. Its experimental setup is not very different than simply substituting the LLM with a textbook with errors.

nkrisc2• 3 days ago

You could make the point that it’s no different than the textbook example you gave, but people don’t generally use textbooks like that, while out in the world people do use LLMs like that all the time.

dwohnitmok2• 3 days ago

People do use textbooks like that all the time in the experimental setup tested (essentially an open book quiz).

I agree there are important differences in how textbooks and LLMs are used in real life. This study didn't explore that at all. It used a setup that essentially elided the difference between the two.

This is why I think it's a bad study. It didn't measure anything of the essential differences of how people use LLMs.

embedding-shape• 3 days ago

You could make the point that it’s no different than the textbook example you gave, but people don’t generally use textbooks like that

Feels like this differs wildly depending on who you consider "people" to be. The average person on the street? Definitely just parrots stuff they've read somewhere, not even a "textbook". A group of software developers used to parsing semi-true information? Probably they'd get it right, yeah.

vanuatu• 3 days ago

I'd wager you get similar results if you gave people a version of Google search that purposely gave you bad results. Like, it's framed as an assistant / lookup tool - is it so surprising that people tend to trust it more? Especially since the participants are likely used to using full-powered models and the researchers give them a purposely gimped one (lol)

People are acting rationally when given AI tools to lookup information, their first consumer use case was as a super-powered Google Search

wonnage3• 3 days ago

Agree that the study design is flawed. Going with the possibly-hallucinated AI answer is rational as long as you know the hallucination rate isn't 100% (or whatever % you get after factoring in the monetary rewards they introduced later in the study)

But in reality when google gives you the wrong answer, you at least have some signals you can use to infer confidence. For example, the number of results, whether the sources are trustworthy, etc.

AI at best tucks that away in a footnote and discourages further critical thinking.

habinero3• 3 days ago

is it so surprising that people tend to trust it more

Yes and no.

I think most people would agree that Wikipedia is, on the whole, a pretty great first resource on anything. It tries to be factual and accurate.

Most people would also agree that Wikipedia can be wrong or manipulated and should never be used for an authoritative source.

And then somehow a computer barfing up words distilled from magic internet concentrate is absolutely trustworthy?

I don't get it.

tsimionescu5• 3 days ago

Why are textbooks relevant here? Even if you repeated the experiment with a textbook instead of the AI and got the same result, what conclusion would you draw from this? The general conclusion of the study seems to be "giving people access to authoritative-seeming but wrong tools for answering questions outside their area of expertise reduces their ability to say they don't know the answer, even when the answer is wrong". So yeah, don't buy bad textbooks for your employees if you don't want them to give you bad textbook answers - but also don't give them AI for things they don't know, perhaps.

I'll also add that even in these simple experimental conditions, I'd bet that having access to a textbook wouldn't have nearly as much of an effect, for a very simple reason: looking up an answer in a textbook is a lot more work than asking an LLM. So when you don't know and aren't forced to answer, I'd bet it's a lot less likely you'd spend the time to look up the answer in the text book. Even more so if the textbook had "this may contain wrong answers!" printed on the cover, like the AIs do.

slibhb• 3 days ago

but also don't give them AI for things they don't know, perhaps

The study doesn't show that at all. It didn't test actual AI.

They could have tested a cohort of subjects with access to actual ChatGPT. Ask yourself why they didn't.

sigbottle• 3 days ago

I've used LLMs to bootstrap successfully in a decent amount of things at this point.

Anyone trusting AI as the single authoritative source of information is stupid - but this follows from the fact that trusting anyone as a "singular point" as a source of information is stupid. You corroborate, you intervene on the world to test your mental model, you discuss with other people. That's what learning is. I've never learned from start to back to a textbook before as the single source of information (besides one philosophy of science textbook; in which I spent a month digging around adjacent fields, and then it just so happened that that one textbook synthesized every piece of information I looked up, and it was mostly a consolidating review).

If your study pre-supposes certain courses of action and artificially constrains the action space for the sake of "reproducibility", you may get a result, and a "scientifically rigorous one". But it's not going to say anything about reality in any meaningful way. While anecdotes and the complexity of real life isn't "science" (in that it's a controlled, repeatable, interventional experiment that's subject to a community of critics who want to hold you up to standards of rigor), there's far more truth in how people actually proceed and engage with these tools.

encomiast3• 3 days ago

Agreed, the headline says "AI advice made people three times less accurate". But if we really want to know how accurate these people were, we need to know how accurate the AI system they use is. If the AI system is hobbled to a point where it is worse than they reasonably expect we can't blame the people or the AI system. This would be the same as claiming the listening to experts make people less accurate in a study that told experts to lie.

A better headline would read, "Very inaccurate AI made people less accurate" but this would make people naturally ask, "what about a reasonably accurate AI?".

habinero3• 3 days ago

If you ask that, you fundamentally misunderstand the point.

It's not about the LLM, it's about whether people will critically evaluate what it spits out.

RA_Fisher• 3 days ago

Exactly, it’s unrepresentative of AI. It’s damaged AI.

jjcm• 3 days ago

For those curious, the LLM they provided participants with was Step 3.5 Flash: https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash

Art9681• 3 days ago

All you have to do is go to the technical Reddits to know this is absolutely true. The AI related ones are even worse.

lumost• 3 days ago

The fear is that we can’t tell when the ai advice is bad on these subjects, and as such probably accept confidently terrible advice.

How often do managers just regurgitate ai advice rather than consulting their experts? How often does a person question an expert because the ai said so?

Naturally, the ai will be right some of the time - but it’s really hard to correct for the times the ai is wrong.

meowface• 3 days ago

This could also apply to deferring to an inaccurate textbook or professor, though.

We know people are going to defer. The solution here is to make AI (including the free tiers) more reliable.

Forgeties795• 3 days ago

This is akin to giving someone a textbook on an obscure subject that has certain factual errors, letting them know they can use that textbook in a quiz on that subject, and then quizzing that person on those facts that the textbook gets wrong.

That strikes me as an incredibly appropriate test because LLM’s are unreliable with factual statements. People need to be able to understand that and not treat them like textbooks which are basically 99.9% accurate (let’s please not bicker over the 99.9%. It’s close enough. A major textbook is safe to treat as accurate, an LLM is not).

d--b• 3 days ago

You’re saying that if the LLMs were right, humans would have been correct in trusting the machine for things they didn’t know?

The point is that LLMs aren’t right, and the people who took the test were probably reminded of that.

Would people have trusted the textbook you’re mentioning if there was a big red warning on each page that said “this book may contain errors”.

The willingness to trust AI even though it may be wrong and even though there’s money on the line is intersting enough as a study imo

skippyfish2• 3 days ago

This study is pretty bad.

The study is OK. The article (and the original headline that came with it) is pretty bad because it claims things that the study doesn't. And I guess it is ironic that the TNW article looks 100% AI-generated.

drysine• 3 days ago

This is akin to giving someone a textbook

Except LLM isn't a textbook, people know that but believe it nonetheless.

rsoto25• 3 days ago

"this is akin to givin someone a textbook on an obscure subject that has certain factual errors." My brother all LLMs give factual errors so, no this is not a problem with the study. In your fake experiment you are hypothesizing a 100% factual LLM which does not exist.

"This study tested none of those" So the study is bunk because it didn't test your favorite LLM flaws?

ShinyLeftPad• 3 days ago

The implication that makes this study relevant is that an LLM is vastly more likely to have factual errors and possibly wildly hallucinate than a proper textbook. If people act the same with both, that IS the actual problem.

lukeschlather• 3 days ago

Did they ask any substantive questions? It sounds like they asked movie trivia questions, in a way that the LLM was almost guaranteed to be wrong. So extremely low-stakes where there is no conceivable downside to being wrong.

tsimionescu5• 3 days ago

That was exactly the point - there was no downside to saying you just don't know, people didn't know, but they still chose to use (what they thought was) AI and got it wrong that way.

abernard1• 3 days ago

Wouldn't it be wild if there were real-world penalties for being wrong?

And people who follow bad advice will get bad results, and people who follow good advice will get good results?

I wonder if this will impact the quality and prevalence of certain AI models in the future.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 days ago

The TL;DR delivers:

Researchers found AI advice suppressed judgment suspension from 44% to 3%, accuracy from 27% to 9%, while confidence rose from 30% to 76%. People trusted wrong AI answers.

I didn't see the article mentioned what they were actually asked, but I'm surprised confidence was only ~30%.

idopmstuff• 3 days ago

"The study, authored by Capraro with Chiara Marcoccia of École Normale Supérieure and Walter Quattrociocchi of Sapienza University of Rome, deliberately used questions where AI models typically fail: visual details from films, such as the colour of a team’s uniform in Bend It Like Beckham."

I get why they used questions where AI models fail, but it also really reduces the value of this study. Nobody is really asking AI the color of a team's uniform in a movie, and if they do and confidently get it wrong, it just doesn't matter at all.

Asking trivial questions also feels like it would affect the rate at which people are willing to confidently say things that are wrong. If you ask me some question of pointless trivia and I ask ChatGPT, I'll probably just repeat the answer because who cares. If you ask me something even mildly important and I ask ChatGPT, I'll either verify the information before I repeat it to you, or I'll qualify that I looked it up with ChatGPT and didn't verify. But some things are just so unimportant that they don't even warrant the disclaimer.

formvoltron• 3 days ago

is that better or worse than 3 beers?

SubiculumCode• 3 days ago

Instead of monetary rewards, they should preface it with, "This is AI model is not very accurate on these types of questions" and then see how they fare. In some areas, AI is quite accurate, so their experience may lead to different expectations.

nlawalker• 3 days ago

And that’s a net win for a lot of people in a lot of situations; that’s the part that needs acknowledgment and study, sociologically.

You can’t say it didn’t warn us, it’s on the tin: “AI might be wrong.”

imoverclocked• 3 days ago

I saw a post that some teachers are now asking students to ask ChatGPT to do their assignments… and then critique it where it is wrong.

I feel like this might be an interesting method for places where the default response tends to be someone submitting copy-pasta: just give the ai-response and then have community discussion around what it missed.

rsoto25• 3 days ago

nice try clammy sammy.

We're gonna continue to push for scientific based approaches to education not some lunatic's idea of an educational experiment that waste's children's education. We tried this with Bill Gates already.

m0llusk• 3 days ago

Right now we don't have AI. We have LLMs. LLMs compose responses and have now ability to say they don't know any answer or are unsure. This combines with the chipper manner of their communication to make for a dangerous mix.

rsanek• 3 days ago

Another case of study design not really supporting the headline. According to the paper, the comparison here was "no advice" or "AI advice": there was no "placebo" where you have advice / references from non-AI materials. Think e.g. Google's instant answer box, pre-AI. It's hard to say without the comparison, but I have to imagine displaying that would have similar effects.

There's plenty of other issues with the study, one of the primary ones being that they chose a relatively 'dumb' AI (Step 3.5 Flash), but also, specifically hand-selected wrong answers. People that are used to using competent AIs that are mostly correct would be operating off of experience that suggests they should trust AI. In this case, by design, they shouldn't have, but it's hard to fault the user for that.

diamondtea• 3 days ago

An A for an I makes the whole world dumb

senshan• 3 days ago

This could serve as a beacon for those who still care:

Richard Feynman: "I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

beezle• 3 days ago

just a psa for others: there is at least one, likely multiple youtube accounts that are making AI generated Feynman slop. Don't trust anything posted prior to the current dishearenting era.

Loughla• 3 days ago

Don't you mean after the current era?

leecommamichael• 3 days ago

I read the study. The wager is:

  $0.10 awarded for a correct answer

  $0.10 deducted for a wrong answer

  $0.00 (no change for a refusal to answer)

There was no detail on whether participants were actually going to be paid, or if they were in the negative at the end, be expected to pay their losses.

I am inclined to believe the effects of the study are real, but not nearly as pronounced as the data. If there were more serious amounts of money on the table, I think common sense would prevail.

luciana1u• 3 days ago

accuracy you can fix with a second source. the 2x confidence is the part without an undo button.

Joel_Mckay• 3 days ago

Also may be irrelevant for people at some jobs, and cause cognitive skill losses over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axOcn--n_lM

https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...

We should remember LLM do have legitimate use-cases like search, as we enter the "Trough of disillusionment" in the hype cycle. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

zahlman2• 3 days ago

made people less accurate
sudy

Intentional?

TimByte2• 3 days ago

Obviously without a proper RAG pipeline or web search it is just going to hallucinate with maximum confidence. It would be more interesting to see the results with top tier models that have proper alignment to refuse to answer when token probability is low. As it is they just proved that people tend to trust well written text in a chat ui

mcmisieck• 3 days ago

So basically AI made people to be Americans ;)

madhu_ghalame• 2 days ago

Exactly. Token costs are only going to increase over time. The later we start relying on manual work, the more expensive and unsustainable it will become. Investing in automation now gives us a significant long-term advantage and much greater confidence in our processes.

AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

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