People readily follow personal advice from AI but it does not improve their well-being

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Luettgau, Lennart, Cheung, Vanessa, Dubois, Magda, Juechems, Keno, Bergs, Jessica, Symes, Luke, Davidson, Henry, O'Dell, Bessie, Kirk, Hannah Rose, Rollwage, Max, Summerfield, Christopher
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Luettgau, Lennart
Cheung, Vanessa
Dubois, Magda
Juechems, Keno
Bergs, Jessica
Symes, Luke
Davidson, Henry
O'Dell, Bessie
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Rollwage, Max
Summerfield, Christopher
author_facet Luettgau, Lennart
Cheung, Vanessa
Dubois, Magda
Juechems, Keno
Bergs, Jessica
Symes, Luke
Davidson, Henry
O'Dell, Bessie
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Rollwage, Max
Summerfield, Christopher
contents People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 6,474), we found that up to 79% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with one of three AI chatbots (GPT-4o, LLama-3.3-70B, Gemini 3 Pro) about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Advice-following remained above 60% even for high-stakes recommendations, suggesting that users only weakly calibrate their reliance on AI advice to potential consequences. Based on autograder evaluations of chat transcripts, LLM advice rarely violated safety best practice. However, when queried 2-3 weeks later, participants receiving personal advice from AI showed no sustained well-being benefits compared to a control group who discussed hobbies and interests with the same chatbots. These findings reveal that consumer LLMs exert substantial influence over real-world personal decisions without delivering measurable psychological benefits.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15352
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle People readily follow personal advice from AI but it does not improve their well-being
Luettgau, Lennart
Cheung, Vanessa
Dubois, Magda
Juechems, Keno
Bergs, Jessica
Symes, Luke
Davidson, Henry
O'Dell, Bessie
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Rollwage, Max
Summerfield, Christopher
Human-Computer Interaction
People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 6,474), we found that up to 79% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with one of three AI chatbots (GPT-4o, LLama-3.3-70B, Gemini 3 Pro) about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Advice-following remained above 60% even for high-stakes recommendations, suggesting that users only weakly calibrate their reliance on AI advice to potential consequences. Based on autograder evaluations of chat transcripts, LLM advice rarely violated safety best practice. However, when queried 2-3 weeks later, participants receiving personal advice from AI showed no sustained well-being benefits compared to a control group who discussed hobbies and interests with the same chatbots. These findings reveal that consumer LLMs exert substantial influence over real-world personal decisions without delivering measurable psychological benefits.
title People readily follow personal advice from AI but it does not improve their well-being
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15352