alt Hacker News+1
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
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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.
> 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.