Study: AI access drops people's willingness to say "I don't know" from 44% to 3%
The Decoder · rss · 2026-09-27
A study with more than 3,000 participants, reported by The Decoder, found that merely having access to AI answers nearly eliminated people's willingness to say "I don't know."
- In one experiment, the share admitting ignorance dropped from 44% to 3% — even though the AI was almost always wrong.
- Participants who used AI felt more confident but were correct only about a third as often as those without it.
The finding highlights a hidden side effect of AI tools: the convenience of getting answers breeds overconfidence and erodes people's sense of their own knowledge boundaries.
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