Study finds AI access nearly eliminates people saying “I don’t know”
Researchers running five experiments with 3,132 participants found that making a language model (Step 3.5 Flash) available dramatically reduced people’s willingness to withhold judgment—“I don’t know” responses fell from roughly 36–44% to about 3–6%—even though the model was often wrong on the tested movie-trivia items. Across studies, AI access raised confidence while cutting accuracy (correct answers fell from ~27.5% to ~9.2%); automatic display of AI answers produced similar effects, and modest financial incentives only partially mitigated the shift.