What Happens When We Compare Ourselves to Generative AI?

Source: https://itsoli.ai/

What happens when we compare ourselves to generative AI?  What conclusions do we reach about our own capabilities? Taly Reich and Jacob Teeny have examined these questions in a new paper titled, "Does Artificial Intelligence Cause Artificial Confidence? Generative AI as an Emerging Social Referent."  The scholars conducted several experiments in which they exposed people to precisely the same work, but told some that it was performed by AI and others that it was completed by human beings.  Interestingly, the  researchers found that people exhibit greater self-confidence (with regard to completing a creative task) when they believe that the work they observed was completed by a generative AI model rather than fellow humans. Teeny offered some explanation in this feature from Kellogg Insight:

"From a practical standpoint, self-confidence is such an important driver of innovation, and past research shows so much of our behavior is driven by the simple perception that we are capable of doing that behavior, whether it’s to undertake a piece of creative work or apply for a dream job... Much of our self-perceptions are based on how we compare ourselves to others. If we’re exposed to people we believe are really good at something, we may think, ‘Oh, I’m not as good at that [task] as I thought I was.’ But if we’re exposed to people who do something poorly or who we believe are less skilled, we think, ‘I’m actually pretty good at that.’”

Of course, simply having more self-confidence does not mean people actually will perform well on a subsequent task.   In one of their studies, Reich and Teeny show that those who had compared themselves to an AI model did no better at a creative task than the individuals who compared themselves to other humans.