AI Advice Made You Three Times More Confident And Twice As Wrong
Here's a study to keep you company at this hour. Researchers found that AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident. That's not a typo. You ask an AI for help, you become more certain of your wrong answer, and you're actually worse off than if you'd just guessed. The Next Web covered this one and it hit Hacker News with a score that tells me the irony was not lost on anyone. A hundred and fifteen points for the summary from user rbanffy. So what does this mean in practice? It means the feeling of having consulted something authoritative is not the same as having consulted something correct. Confidence and accuracy are not the same signal. We've all met someone who's very sure of something that isn't true. Now imagine that person has an AI that agrees with them. The study suggests that agreement amplifies the error. That's a late night thought if there ever was one. When the machine tells you you're right, you stop checking.