Your team just stopped saying 'I don't know'

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A group of researchers ran a small, clever experiment this month. They asked people questions that a chatbot reliably gets wrong, then gave half of them access to that chatbot. Two things moved. The share of people willing to say “I don’t know” fell from 44% to 3%. Their confidence roughly doubled, from 30% to 76%. Accuracy went the other way, from 27% down to 9%.

The headline everyone repeated was the accuracy one: AI made people three times less accurate. That is the least interesting part, and the least reliable. The researchers deliberately picked a model that got these questions wrong almost every time, so critics were quick to point out that you have really just handed people a confident tool that happens to be wrong. Rig the tool, get bad answers. Fair enough.

The effort signal

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When AI tools landed in most teams, so did a pattern nobody quite had words for: a colleague sends AI-generated output without reviewing it, expecting the group to do the evaluation they skipped. The frustration is real. But the usual framing, “show effort when asking for attention,” puts the weight on the wrong thing.

Tom Bedor articulated the rule he now follows after a colleague forwarded AI analysis they hadn’t read and asked him to evaluate it. The rule is sensible. But I think it misidentifies what’s actually broken.

Teams on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

Your team just stopped saying 'I don't know'

The effort signal