Superhuman artificial intelligence can improve human decision-making by increasing novelty

Minkyu Shin, Jin Kim, Bas van Opheusden, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

How will superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) affect human decision-making? And what will be the mechanisms behind this effect? We address these questions in a domain where AI already exceeds human performance, analyzing more than 5.8 million move decisions made by professional Go players over the past 71 y (1950 to 2021). To address the first question, we use a superhuman AI program to estimate the quality of human decisions across time, generating 58 billion counterfactual game patterns and comparing the win rates of actual human decisions with those of counterfactual AI decisions. We find that humans began to make significantly better decisions following the advent of superhuman AI. We then examine human players' strategies across time and find that novel decisions (i.e., previously unobserved moves) occurred more frequently and became associated with higher decision quality after the advent of superhuman AI. Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere2214840120
JournalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume120
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 21 2023

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General

Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • cognitive performance
  • innovation
  • judgment and decision-making
  • novelty

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