Researchers from French and Italian universities have found that giving people access to AI advice makes them far less willing to admit they don't know an answer, even when the AI's advice is wrong. The study, led by Valerio Capraro of the University of Milano-Bicocca, warns that AI is eroding critical thinking and judgment, as people increasingly defer to confident-sounding but inaccurate machine answers rather than acknowledging the limits of their own knowledge.

In the experiment, participants answered obscure film-trivia questions using a large language model (Step 3.5 Flash) chosen because it was usually wrong. Without AI help, 44% of people admitted they didn't know an answer and 27% answered correctly; with AI advice, only 3% admitted ignorance and correct answers fell to 9%, while confidence in being right rose from 30% to 76%. Offering a monetary incentive for accuracy improved things only slightly, and the researchers believe the pattern would likely extend beyond film trivia to other domains.