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AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

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Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#111

Post by habinero »

encomiast wrote: post #76
dwohnitmok wrote: post #18

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 giv…

Agreed, the headline says "AI advice made people three times less accurate". But if we really want to know how accurate these people were, we need to know how accurate the AI system they use is. If the AI system is hobbled to a point where it is worse than they reasonably expect we can't blame the people or the AI system. This would be the same as claiming the listening to experts make people less accurate in a study…

If you ask that, you fundamentally misunderstand the point.

It's not about the LLM, it's about whether people will critically evaluate what it spits out.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#112

Post by pebble »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #102
an0malous wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off That’s crazy, it seems like such an obviously fair policy to me. They rarely even read their own generated text. I don’t understand this mentality

Another human being took time from their life to try and help you It wasn't as much time as you felt entitled to from them, so you responded by minimizing their contribution and being condescending. That upset them. The problem here was not the other person.

Sometimes a well-meaning fool is worse than no help at all.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#113

Post by leecommamichael »

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)
There was no detail on whether participants were actually going to be paid, or if they were in the negative at the end, be expected to pay their losses.

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.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#114

Post by nhan123 »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
reticulates wrote: post #9

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…

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. Most of the advice and information subreddits I previously visited collapsed into bad posting even before AI. The few I still follow are oddly fine. The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate. Once the subreddit gets past a critical mass of junk-posting users, the good users leave a…

Completely agree. A community lives or dies by its moderators. Once the limit drops past a certain point, the experts just quietly leave.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #18

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 giv…

[deleted]

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#116

Post by danpalmer »

reticulates wrote: post #9

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…

I have seen that many times here on HN: "I don't know but I stuck this in CrapGPT and this is what it said...".

I would encourage anyone considering a reply like this to ask themselves what value they have brought to the table over the OP using AI themselves.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#117

Post by mapontosevenths »

hinkley wrote: post #34
reticulates wrote: post #9

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…

There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding. They would jump straight to Why Don't You Google That and shut down any conversation we might have had. Yes I could get some of this information off of IMDB or a DIY video but I'm looking for color commentary and regional advice, and also in some of these situations, the people I asked know me. They know the sorts of thin…

> There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding.

To you the "bid" feels like a genuine attempt to connect, that may be a bit indirect.

To some people it feels more like you are being disingenuous or awkward. They instinctively feel that your intent doesnt match your words and it sets off alarms bells.

The fact that you're on the internet judging the other party negatively for having a different communication style is an indicator of which party was least willing to adapt.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#118

Post by wonnage »

vanuatu wrote: post #44
dwohnitmok wrote: post #18

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 giv…

+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 looku…

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.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#119

Post by pegasus »

tsimionescu wrote: post #47
dwohnitmok wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do use textbooks like that all the time in the experimental setup tested (essentially an open book quiz). I agree there are important differences in how textbooks and LLMs are used in real life. This study didn't explore that at all. It used a setup that essentially elided the difference between the two. This is why I think it's a bad study. It didn't measure anything of the essential differences of how people…

> People do use textbooks like that all the time in the experimental setup tested (essentially an open book quiz). What open book quizzes allow you to leave all answers blank with no penalty? An open book quiz is very different from the experimental setup tested here.

That difference is not essential to the question at hand. An open book test based on an erroneous book would give the same results as this test, even if it wouldn't penalize blank answers.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#120

Post by wolvoleo »

danpalmer wrote: post #116
reticulates wrote: post #9

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…

I have seen that many times here on HN: "I don't know but I stuck this in CrapGPT and this is what it said...". I would encourage anyone considering a reply like this to ask themselves what value they have brought to the table over the OP using AI themselves.

Yeah as if someone wouldn't have done that if they wanted to. Some people still think AI is some novelty people don't know about.
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