AI Advice Reduces Human "I Don't Know" Responses, Despite Errors.

Research involving over 3,000 participants across five experiments investigated how AI advice influences human judgment, particularly the willingness to admit uncertainty. The study deliberately provided incorrect AI advice to isolate the effect of AI presence from its accuracy. The findings revealed that merely having access to AI, whether actively requested or passively displayed, drastically diminished participants' inclination to decline answering difficult questions. Consequently, individuals attempted more questions but achieved significantly lower accuracy, while their self-reported confidence paradoxically almost doubled. Even when accuracy was incentivized and inaccuracy penalized, participants still sought and followed AI advice more often and suspended judgment less frequently than when AI was unavailable. This suggests that ubiquitous AI suggestions may not only impact answer correctness but also fundamentally alter the metacognitive threshold for deciding one's own knowledge.