Combining humans and AI produces performance losses on average across measured tasks, with synergy significantly negative for constrained-choice decision tasks and positive only for open-ended creation tasks.

grounds222d34b5_Vaccaro Almaatouq Malone - When combinations of humans and AI are useful - CC-BY-4.0 2024.md

In our broad sample of recent experiments, the vast majority (about 85%) of the effect sizes were for decision-making tasks in which participants chose among a predefined set of options. But in these cases we found that the average effect size for human–AI synergy was significantly negative.

qualifiesee69960a_Vaccaro Almaatouq Malone - When combinations of humans and AI are useful - CC-BY-4.0 2024.md

Even though our main result suggests that—on average—combining humans and AI leads to performance losses, we do not think this means that combining humans and AI is a bad idea.

qualifiesee69960a_Vaccaro Almaatouq Malone - When combinations of humans and AI are useful - CC-BY-4.0 2024.md

Finally, we found a high level of heterogeneity among the effect sizes in our analysis. The moderators we investigated account for some of this heterogeneity, but much remains unexplained.