A brutal study.

AI may make people lose the habit of stopping when they do not know enough.

Without AI, people withheld judgment on 44% of questions, but AI access cut that rate to 3%.

Participants who answered without AI were correct about 27% of the time, while those who received the deliberately wrong AI advice were correct only 9% of the time, despite feeling much more confident.

Saying “I don’t know” is an important part of decision making.

But now AI is able to answer just about anything. Often not requested for, like AI summaries.

Therefore, they posed a straightforward query: Do people become less inclined to suspend judgment when they have access to AI advice?

People almost never said “I don’t know” when AI gave them advice.

A fluent answer can make uncertainty feel settled, even when someone had good reason to hold back.

Across 5 experiments with 3,132 people, participants could answer 6 obscure movie questions or decline. The researchers chose questions that the AI often answered incorrectly, then either showed its advice automatically or let people request it.

Correct answers also fell from about 27% to 9%, even as participants reported much greater confidence.

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– arxiv. org/abs/2607.13562

Title: "AI advice suppresses people's willingness to say "I don't know", even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized"