The Confidence Effect: How Exposure to AI Creativity Shapes Self-Belief
Overview: In the paper titled, “Does Artificial Intelligence Cause Artificial Confidence? Generative Artificial Intelligence as an Emerging Social Referent,” NYU Stern Professor Taly Reich and co-author Jacob D. Teeny (Northwestern University) explore if exposure to generative AI content can reshape people's self-views. This study looks at how people react when they see creative work made by AI, like poems, jokes, or art. It focuses on how that exposure affects a person’s confidence in their own creativity.
Why study this now: Generative AI is sweeping the world, and yet people know very little about how people respond to the work it creates.
In particular, it's unclear how exposure to generative AI work affects people's own self-views and opinions. As more people come across AI-generated art or writing, it's important to understand how this exposure changes how people feel about their own abilities. This research helps catch early psychological effects of interacting with AI before they become widespread or misunderstood.
What the authors found: The researchers found that when people saw creative content labeled as made by AI (versus a human), they felt more confident about their own ability to do something similar. This effect happened across different types of creative work—jokes, stories, poems, and art. Because people generally see AI as a “lower bar” to compare themselves against, this boosts their self-confidence. But this effect doesn’t work the same way in subjects like science or math, where people think AI is just as capable (or even more capable) than humans.
What does this change: This changes how people think about AI—not just as a tool, but as something people compare themselves to. It also gives teachers, mentors, and employers a new way to help boost people’s confidence. For example, showing a student an AI-written essay might make them feel better about writing their own compared to showing them another student’s essay. For companies and educators looking to bolster the creative self-confidence of their members, exposure to generative AI-labeled work can help boost those self-perceptions. This can also be useful if people are simply stuck in how to proceed with a task; asking generative AI to create something can help inspire psychological confidence to do it themselves.
Key insight: “Most research on generative AI has looked at what it can do (e.g., replace certain jobs) or how people like or dislike the content it creates,” said the researchers. “This is some of the first work to examine how exposure to gen-AI content can shift people's self-views, namely, one of their most influential ones — their self-confidence.”
This research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.