People expect AI assistance to save far more time than assistance from another highly intelligent human participant¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r3 · q3
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Participants predicted AI assistance to reduce completion times by 68.5 seconds, a speedup expectation significantly greater than for another participant, and preferred AI assistance. → Sunny Yu 2026

Evidence¶

Sunny Yu 2026¶

Sunny Yu, Myra Cheng, Ahmad Jabbar, Ilia Sucholutsky, Katherine M. Collins, Dan Jurafsky, Robert D. Hawkins. (2026). Cognitive offloading and the speedup illusion in human-AI interaction. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23177 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.23177

q3 · i? · causal · r3

In the prediction sample, a linear mixed-effects model with prediction target and assistance source as fixed effects showed people "expect AI assistance to reduce task completion times by 68.5 seconds". The expected speedup was significantly greater for AI than for another highly intelligent participant (β=−51.4, p<0.001), and participants preferred AI assistance (β=1.37, p<0.001).

"people expect AI assistance to reduce task completion times by 68.5 seconds (β=68.5,SE=3.37,z=20.34,p<0.001)"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• People significantly underestimate AI-assisted completion times on simple cognitive tasks, even though AI assistance saves little or no actual time (the speedup illusion) — related
• People are well-calibrated about their own independent completion times — related
• Participants more averse to thinking are more susceptible to the speedup illusion; AI familiarity measures do not predict calibration error — related
• AI assistance provides no significant overall time savings and can slow completion on easy task variants, with chat-interface friction (prompting time) dominating on trivial tasks — related