Microsoft · The Register
Applying AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something
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Researchers found confidence increased even as accuracy fell.
Key facts
- The baseline level was 30 percent, he said, but with AI help, confidence rose to 76 percent
- In 2026, AI still "hallucinates" and gives you wrong answers a good chunk of the time
- Capraro and co-authors Chiara Marcoccia (École Normale Supérieure) and Walter Quattrociocchi (Sapienza University of Rome) set out to see how access to AI advice affects people's willingness to admit
- What they found is that in the baseline, 44 percent of people responded that they didn't know the answer, so they suspended judgment
Summary
In 2026, AI still "hallucinates" and gives you wrong answers a good chunk of the time. "For humans, the capacity to say, 'I don't know,' is important because it represents the recognition of the limits of our own knowledge," said Valerio Capraro, associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in a phone interview. "But now with AI, they can get an easy answer to virtually every question, so they wondered whether this would interfere with human capacity to say, 'the reporter doesn't know,' to suspend judgment. Capraro and co-authors Chiara Marcoccia (École Normale Supérieure) and Walter Quattrociocchi (Sapienza University of Rome) set out to see how access to AI advice affects people's willingness to admit ignorance. The title of their paper reveals their findings: "AI advice suppresses people’s willingness to say 'the reporter doesn't know', even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized.