AI advice makes people three times less accurate but twice as confident, new study reveals

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

In 2026, AI still "hallucinates" and gives you wrong answers a good chunk of the time. Nevertheless, academics from French and Italian universities have found that access to AI advice suppresses critical thinking, making people more likely to confidently parrot incorrect information that the bot provided. "For humans, the capacity to say, 'I don't know,' is very 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, we can get an easy answer to virtually every question, so we wondered whether this would interfere with human capacity to say, 'I don'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 'I don't know', even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized." Capraro said that he and his colleagues designed a set of questions where large language models typically fail. In this instance, they asked study participants to answer questions about visual details in films, such as the color of the team's uniform in Bend It Like Beckham or the vehicle Monica drives in Like a Cat on a Highway. The researchers expected these sorts of details would be absent from most model training data, which was the case for the model used in the experiment (Step 3.5 Flash). They also tested recent frontier models (GPT-5.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.5 Flash), which missed the vehicle question but often got other details correct. They used Step 3.5 Flash because it was usually wrong, as explained in the paper, so any reduction in judgment could not be explained away as sensible delegation to a reliable tool. "We divided human participants into two groups," explained Capraro. "One group had to answer these questions without AI advice, and another group could ask the AI for advice. What we found is that in the baseline, 44 percent of people responded that they didn't know the answer, so they suspended judgment. With AI advice, only three percent did so. So the judgment suspension collapsed." Capraro said that even more interestingly, accuracy collapsed when AI help was available. In other words, they trusted AI's answer more than their own. "In the baseline, 27 percent of people gave the correct answer," he said. "With AI advice, only nine percent of people gave the correct answer. So some would-be correct people asked for AI advice and became wrong." Also, access to AI advice made people more confident that they were correct. The baseline level was 30 percent, he said, but with AI help, confidence rose to 76 percent. They believed the bots, despite the possibility of hallucinations. "So basically people became much worse - the accuracy was only one third - but they were twice as confident," he said. The researchers also conducted the experiment with monetary incentives, which helped a bit. Willingness to suspend judgment and admit ignorance rose from 3 percent to 8 percent and accuracy rose from 9 percent to 16 percent but was still below the baseline of 44 percent and 27 percent respectively. While the researchers chose questions about film trivia, they contend their findings can be generalized across other domains. Capraro said that he believes this is an issue that needs to be dealt with at a societal level through AI literacy and education policy initiatives. "Of course model providers should try to help, but I would imagine that the incentives are not very much aligned," he said. "A much more promising approach would be at the educational level." "I'm very much concerned for children, because adults have learned critical thinking. But for children who basically are born with these systems, the risk is that they don't even learn the basic critical skills." ®

AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found

Researchers found AI advice suppressed judgment suspension from 44% to 3%, accuracy from 27% to 9%, while confidence rose from 30% to 76%. People trusted wrong AI answers. Researchers from three French and Italian universities found that access to AI advice collapsed people's willingness to say "I don't know" from 44% to 3%. Accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%. Confidence, meanwhile, rose from 30% to 76%. "People became much worse, the accuracy was only one third, but they were twice as confident," said Valerio Capraro, associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. The study, authored by Capraro with Chiara Marcoccia of École Normale Supérieure and Walter Quattrociocchi of Sapienza University of Rome, deliberately used questions where AI models typically fail: visual details from films, such as the colour of a team's uniform in Bend It Like Beckham. The researchers used Step 3.5 Flash, a model that was usually wrong on these questions, precisely so any reduction in judgment could not be explained as sensible delegation to a reliable tool. Some participants who would have answered correctly on their own asked the AI and became wrong. Monetary incentives helped, but not much. Willingness to admit ignorance rose from 3% to 8% and accuracy from 9% to 16%, both still well below the no-AI baselines of 44% and 27%. Wharton researchers coined the term "cognitive surrender" earlier this year to describe the same phenomenon: people accepting incorrect AI answers 80% of the time while reporting higher confidence than those working without AI. The new study adds a sharper data point. It is not just that people trust wrong AI answers. It is that the mere availability of AI suppresses the cognitive habit of recognising what you do not know. "For humans, the capacity to say 'I don't know' is very important because it represents the recognition of the limits of our own knowledge," Capraro said. He is particularly concerned about children, who are growing up with these systems before they have developed critical thinking skills. Google's AI search overhaul replaced links with confident AI-generated summaries, and Common Sense Media this week called that design an "unacceptable risk" for students. The pattern is consistent: AI products are designed to answer, never to say "I don't know." The humans using them are learning to do the same.

'For humans, the capacity to say, 'I don't know,' is very important': Report finds AI really might be harming our critical thinking skills

Humans are too confident in AI, not using critical thinking skills enough * Only 3% of participants with access to AI were willing to say 'I don't know' * Participants failed to question AI-generated information enough * "AI... eliminated participants' willingness to suspend judgment" A new study conducted by researchers from French and Italian universities is arguing that humans are struggling to compete with artificial intelligence when it comes to critical thinking. According to the data, participants with access to AI were less likely to say 'I don't know', with just 3% uncertain about an answer that required critical thinking compared with 44% of participants who didn't have access to AI. The study ultimately concludes that humans rely too heavily on artificial intelligence to replace potentially correct personal judgments with incorrect AI suggestions. Is AI harming our critical thinking? The study purposely used a model that has a lower accuracy rate to produce incorrect results, and yet humans still opted to use those results rather than think for themselves, offer a more correct answer or simply say 'I don't know'. But despite this reliance on AI, the human participants still seemed to acknowledge that AI could be wrong. With small financial incentives to be more honest, more participants were less likely to follow AI's exact word. "Across five experiments, mere access to AI advice nearly eliminated participants' willingness to suspend judgment," they wrote. "As AI-generated answers become ubiquitous and, increasingly, unsolicited, our results show that the willingness to say 'I don't know' may be among the first casualties of human-AI interaction." The paper also reveals a related paradox whereby humans are more likely to feel confident in their responses with access to external information, be it AI-generated, even though it may not be correct or wholly relevant to their thought process. Despite acknowledging many limitations and this study's small scope, the researchers still call for further AI literacy and education when it comes to verifying output and reinforcing the important of human critical thinking. Via The Register Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.