Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) can aid humans in a wide range of tasks, but its effectiveness critically depends on users being able to evaluate the accuracy of GenAI outputs and their own expertise. Here we asked how confidence in self and GenAI contributes to decisions to seek and rely on advice from GenAI ('prospective confidence'), and how advice-taking in turn shapes this confidence ('retrospective confidence'). In a novel paradigm involving text generation, participants formulated plans for events, and could request advice from a GenAI (Study 1; N=200) or were randomly assigned to receive advice (Study 2; N=300), which they could rely on or ignore. Advice requests in Study 1 were related to higher prospective confidence in GenAI and lower confidence in self. Advice-seekers showed increased retrospective confidence in GenAI, while those who declined advice showed increased confidence in self. Random assignment in Study 2 revealed that advice exposure increases confidence in GenAI and in self, suggesting that GenAI advice-taking causally boosts retrospective confidence. These results were mirrored in advice reliance, operationalised as the textual similarity between GenAI advice and participants' responses, with reliance associated with increased retrospective confidence in both GenAI and self. Critically, participants who chose to obtain/rely on advice provided more detailed responses (likely due to the output's verbosity), but failed to check the output thoroughly, missing key information. These findings underscore a key role for confidence in interactions with GenAI, shaped by both prior beliefs about oneself and the reliability of AI, and context-dependent exposure to advice.

翻译：生成式人工智能（GenAI）能够在广泛任务中辅助人类，但其有效性关键取决于用户能否评估GenAI输出的准确性及其自身专业知识。本研究探讨了对自身及GenAI的信心如何影响寻求和依赖GenAI建议的决策（‘前瞻性信心’），以及建议采纳行为如何反过来塑造这种信心（‘回顾性信心’）。通过一项涉及文本生成的新范式，参与者制定事件计划，并可向GenAI请求建议（研究1；N=200）或被随机分配接收建议（研究2；N=300），他们可选择采纳或忽略建议。研究1中建议请求与较高的GenAI前瞻性信心及较低的自身信心相关。寻求建议者表现出对GenAI的回顾性信心增强，而拒绝建议者则表现出自身信心提升。研究2的随机分配显示，接触建议会增强对GenAI及自身的信心，表明GenAI建议采纳能因果性地提升回顾性信心。这些结果在建议依赖度（操作化为GenAI建议与参与者回答的文本相似性）中得到镜像体现，依赖行为与GenAI及自身回顾性信心的增强均相关。关键发现是：选择获取/依赖建议的参与者提供了更详细的回答（可能源于输出的冗长特性），但未能彻底核查输出内容，遗漏了关键信息。这些发现凸显了信心在与GenAI交互中的核心作用，其形成既受关于自身及AI可靠性的先验信念影响，也受情境依赖的建议接触所塑造。