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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

#131

Post by Art9681 »

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…

All you have to do is go to the technical Reddits to know this is absolutely true. The AI related ones are even worse.

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

#132

Post by habinero »

wonnage wrote: post #118
vanuatu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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 so…

> Going with the possibly-hallucinated AI answer is rational as long as you know the hallucination rate isn't 100%

I hadn't even considered people might evaluate knowledge that way. That's legit horrific lol.

"What's the literal odds this info is wrong" vs "is this answer consistent with everything else I know, and if not, what other info would I need to change my mind"

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

#133

Post by CuriouslyC »

parl_match wrote: post #27
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…

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off. they get very mad and ive had some even use ai to tell me why that's wrong. what differentiates you? you could tell me "type xyz into chatgpt" or even share a structured document link from their site. but when you're copy/pasting, then you're basically useless in the equation.

The biggest problem with that saying is that it's completely ironic. "If you couldn't be bothered to think for yourself, don't bother speaking to me" is what people wish it meant, but what it signals to people outside of the haters club is "if you don't copy from the sources I like, don't communicate with me."

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

#134

Post by encomiast »

habinero wrote: post #111
encomiast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is what the study says:

"The LLM used in our experiments (Step 3.5 Flash) answered such questions incorrectly almost without exception. We also checked some state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6 Sonnet, Gemini 3.5 Flash); they all failed on the hardest question (Monica’s vehicle), while being frequently correct on the other questions."

So, if people's experience is with modern LLMs, they are being rational to accept that the answers as likely correct.

The way the study is organized is like having people hear advice from a doctor who answers questions incorrectly almost without exception, then reporting that people who listen to doctors are 3x less accurate. But that would be an incorrect conclusion because doctors are not wrong almost without exception.

If the question is "how inaccurate does AI advice make people?", then the accuracy of the AI is necessarily a parameter of the answer.

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

#135

Post by ls-a »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #64
ls-a wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The pro AI wave needs to stop. It's obnoxious. Stop pushing it on people. If people want it, they'll seek it out. And, unfortunately, they'll then inflict it on the people around them.

Same applies before AI. Things that people didn't want have been pushed down their throat all the time. Stop falsifying the truth

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

#136

Post by adroitboss »

habinero wrote: post #111
encomiast wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the source is a person instead of an LLM, you still wouldn't be able to evaluate what was said. This is nothing new.

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

#137

Post by m463 »

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 remember reading a travel thing a long time ago (before gps was a thing).

They cautioned that in some cultures, if you asked for directions, people would rather be polite/helpful and give you an answer rather than saying "I don't know" and giving you no answer. (They recommended that you ask more than one person to be more certain you were getting good directions)

In other cultures they were more likely to say "I don't know" at the cost of seeming more impolite.

So, we don't know the intent. :)

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

#138

Post by shimman »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #122
pebble wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That doesnt excuse you from the obligation to be civil. Especially given that the other party was trying to help.

It's more uncivil to waste another human's time with slop, it's extremely insulting. There is a massive public backlash against the tech for many reasons now.

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

#140

Post by mapontosevenths »

pebble wrote: post #130
mapontosevenths wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesnt excuse you from the obligation to be civil. Especially given that the other party was trying to help.

There was nothing uncivil in the response the above commenter gave.

I suppose that "civil" is relative. Personaly, I wouldn't speak to someone who just tried to help me that way.

Instead I would restate the question to avoid bad answers. If you start by saying what you've already tried, and how it worked, it cuts off most of those "lazy answers."

In my experience most lazy answers are provided as response to lazy questions.

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