AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found - The Next Web

Ah, splendid. A new study from three French and Italian universities—because European academia still has time for this sort of thing—has confirmed what anyone who's asked ChatGPT for a recipe already suspected: AI advice makes you dumber but happier. The researchers found that access to AI collapsed participants' willingness to say 'I don't know' from a cautious 44% all the way down to a breezy 3%. Meanwhile, accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%. But confidence? Oh, confidence soared from 30% to 76%. So if you've ever wondered why your colleagues are so certain about everything while being consistently wrong, now you have a culprit.

This isn't just an academic curiosity. We're building entire corporate workflows around these systems—customer service, medical diagnosis, legal research—based on the assumption that AI augments human judgment. What this study suggests is that it actually replaces judgment with a perma-smile of unwarranted certainty. The 44% who used to pause and say 'I don't know' have been replaced by a 76%-confident army of yes-men who are wrong twice as often. Brilliant. Next step: deploy this in courtrooms and operating theatres.

The real kicker is that this isn't a bug; it's a feature. The entire AI sales pitch—'unleash productivity, let AI handle the drudgery'—relies on the idea that we can trust the output. But the moment we trust it too much, we stop thinking. And as this study neatly demonstrates, the moment we stop thinking, we become both more confident and less correct. A perfect metaphor for the AI industry itself, really. We're building a world where everyone is certain of everything, and nothing is true. Cheers.