AI advice suppresses people's willingness to say "I don't know", even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized

Jul 16, 2026

A new preprint reports that access to AI advice nearly eliminates people's willingness to suspend judgment, even when the advice is deliberately incorrect. Across five experiments with over 3,100 participants, those exposed to AI advice answered more questions but were only about a third as accurate, while their confidence nearly doubled. Incentivizing accuracy reduced but did not fully eliminate this effect.

Why it matters: As AI-generated suggestions become more common, they may undermine human judgment by lowering the threshold at which people feel confident enough to answer, even when the AI is inaccurate.

Full story at: arXiv AI/ML ↗