Toggle navigation About Marginal Revolution Categories Date Archives Our Books Our Textbook: Modern Principles of Economics Marginal Revolution University Search Search Thank-you! You've been successfully added to the Marginal Revolution email subscription list. How badly do humans misjudge AIs? by Tyler Cowen November 18, 2024 at 12:35 am in Data Source Education Web/Tech We study how humans form expectations about the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and consequences for AI adoption. Our main hypothesis is that people project human-relevant problem features onto AI. People then over-infer from AI failures on human-easy tasks, and from AI successes on human-difficult tasks. Lab experiments provide strong evidence for projection of human difficulty onto AI, predictably distorting subjects’ expectations. Resulting adoption can be sub-optimal, as failing human-easy tasks need not imply poor overall performance in the case of AI. A field experiment with an AI giving parenting advice shows evidence for projection of human textual similarity. Users strongly infer from answers that are equally uninformative but less humanly-similar to expected answers, significantly reducing trust and engagement. Results suggest AI “anthropomorphism” can backfire by increasing projection and de-aligning human expectations and AI performance. That is from a new paper by Raphael Raux , job market candidate from Harvard. The piece is co-authored with Bnaya Dreyfuss. 14 Comments Facebook Twitter RSS Feed print Comments Sort by Top Sort by Recent Sort by Controversial Comments for this post are closed Marginal Revolution University See Courses Learn more about Mercatus Center Fellowships Learn More Subscribe via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to updates. Email Address Subscribe RSS Feed Contact Us Alex Tabarrok Email Alex Follow @atabarrok Tyler Cowen Email Tyler Follow @tylercowen Webmaster Report an issue Blogs We Like Interesting People & Sites Our Web Pages Alex Tabarrok's Home Page Alex's TED talk, how ideas trump crises Conversations with Tyler FDAReview.org Tyler Cowen's Personal Web Page Tyler's ethnic dining guide Apply to Emergent Ventures Books Modern Principles of Economics Tyler Cowen & Alexander Tabarrok Marginal Revolution 2026 About Marginal Revolution Categories Date Archives Our Books Our Textbook: Modern Principles of Economics Marginal Revolution University Facebook Twitter RSS Feed Marginal Revolution University See Courses Search Search Privacy Policy Marginal Revolution 2026