AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

"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.

So basically AI made people to be Americans ;)

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

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%.

> made people less accurate

> sudy

Intentional?

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.

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

is that better or worse than 3 beers?

AI assisted/induced Dunning–Kruger effect

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.

An A for an I makes the whole world dumb

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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.

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.