AI can increase speed and productivity, but it may also erode human judgment.

Dependence on AI can increase people's willingness to accept wrong answers without hesitation.

It's important to continue to think critically when using AI and to maintain ownership over the final product.

For centuries, a tiny phrase has protected human judgment from mistakes: I don’t know. Ich weiss nicht. No sé. These words created a magical pause between impression and conclusion, a space in which evidence could be checked, assumptions questioned, and conclusions revised.

“I don’t know” reflects the ability to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge and resist pretending otherwise. In that sense, accepting uncertainty is part of agency. It keeps the mind open long enough for mature judgment to occur. That takes courage.

Artificial intelligence is compressing that space. Across five experiments involving more than 3,000 participants, researchers asked individuals challenging topical questions while allowing them to reply, “I don’t know.” Participants were then given deliberately incorrect AI advice.

Without AI support, participants were relatively willing to withhold judgment when uncertain. Once AI advice was introduced, that restraint almost disappeared. Their accuracy also fell sharply, even as their confidence more than doubled. In other words, AI made participants considerably more certain while making them less likely to be right. They went the convenient path of accepting wrong answers unquestioned, while concomitantly losing the ability to recognize when an answer was wrong.

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