Does Artificial Intelligence Cause Artificial Confidence? Generative AI as an Emerging Social Referent

As generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) becomes more prevalent, it becomes increasingly important to understand how people psychologically respond to the content it explicitly creates. In this research, we demonstrate that exposure to gen-AI produced content can affect people’s self-confidence at the same task through a social comparison process. Anchoring this research in the domain of creativity, we find that exposing people to creative content believed to have been created by gen-AI (vs. a human peer) increases people’s self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities. This effect emerges for jokes, stories, and visual art, and it can consequently increase people’s willingness to attempt the activity – even though the greater confidence underscoring their actions may be unwarranted. We further show that these effects emerge because gen-AI is perceived as a lower social referent for creative endeavors, bolstering people’s own self-perceptions. However, for domains in which gen-AI is perceived as an equal or greater social referent (i.e., in fact-based domains), the effects are attenuated. These findings have significant implications for understanding human-AI interactions, antecedents for creative self-confidence, and expand the known referents that people use for social comparison effects.