Access to AI answers reduces willingness to admit "I don't know," even when AI is wrong.

Intellectual humility shields against believing AI-generated misinformation.

Epistemic resilience—tolerating uncertainty—protects judgment and fosters ethical reflection.

New research shows that people with access to AI-generated answers are less willing to admit "I don't know," even when those answers are wrong.

In the study, researchers asked participants very specific, obscure questions about films. Participants could always decline to answer and admit they did not know, suspending judgment instead of guessing. The stakes were raised with a monetary penalty for mistakes. But across every version of the experiment, having access to AI advice nearly eliminated participants' willingness to say they did not know, even though AI advice was usually wrong on these questions.

In another study, researchers found that intellectual humility, the metacognitive awareness of one's own limited knowledge, acted as a protective cognitive filter against AI-generated health misinformation. Participants with higher intellectual humility rated pseudoscientific content as less credible.

The Known Problem of Automation Bias

Longstanding evidence on automation bias illustrates the human tendency to over-rely on and defer to automated outputs. This has been a concern in medical decision-making and other fields like aviation. In the case of AI chatbots, some users may not be aware of their limitations, and may incorrectly perceive and treat automated systems as infallible "like a calculator" or like GPS.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to answer in a fluent, authoritative tone independent of whether the underlying information is reliable. This is highly persuasive, and there is not yet a direct way to gauge the level of certainty behind each answer without independently cross-checking it.

This is further complicated by the fact that LLMs frequently do provide accurate and helpful information and resources, even though the way........

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