A paradox of AI fluency
2026-04-28 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how a person's skill in using AI affects what the AI delivers. They found that skilled users take on harder tasks and work together with the AI by refining goals and checking results, while beginners mostly passively accept what AI gives them. Skilled users encounter more obvious failures but usually fix or learn from them, leading to better outcomes on complex tasks. Beginners often think things worked when they actually didn't, missing problems. The authors suggest people should actively engage with AI and builders should design for user involvement, not just easy experiences.
AI fluencyuser engagementinteractive AIcomplex tasksfailure recoveryAI-human collaborationWildChat datasetAI product design
Authors
Christopher Potts, Moritz Sudhof
Abstract
How much does a user's skill with AI shape what AI actually delivers for them? This question is critical for users, AI product builders, and society at large, but it remains underexplored. Using a richly annotated sample of 27K transcripts from WildChat-4.8M, we show that fluent users take on more complex tasks than novices and adopt a fundamentally different interactional mode: they iterate collaboratively with the AI, refining goals and critically assessing outputs, whereas novices take a passive stance. These differences lead to a paradox of AI fluency: fluent users experience more failures than novices -- but their failures tend to be visible (a direct consequence of their engagement), they are more likely to lead to partial recovery, and they occur alongside greater success on complex tasks. Novices, by contrast, more often experience invisible failures: conversations that appear to end successfully but in fact miss the mark. Taken together, these results reframe what success with AI depends on. Individuals should adopt a stance of active engagement rather than passive acceptance. AI product builders should recognize that they are designing not just model behavior but user behavior; encouraging deep engagement, rather than friction-free experiences, will lead to more success overall. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/bigspinai/bigspin-fluency-outcomes