People readily follow personal advice from AI but it does not improve their well-being

TL;DR

This study shows that many people follow AI chatbots' advice on personal issues, but such advice does not lead to lasting improvements in their well-being, despite its influence on decisions.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale longitudinal evidence on AI advice-following behavior and its lack of long-term well-being benefits.

Findings

Up to 79% of participants followed AI advice after brief discussions.

Advice-following remained high even for high-stakes recommendations.

No sustained well-being benefits were observed from AI advice over 2-3 weeks.

Abstract

People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 6,474), we found that up to 79% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with one of three AI chatbots (GPT-4o, LLama-3.3-70B, Gemini 3 Pro) about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Advice-following remained above 60% even for high-stakes recommendations, suggesting that users only weakly calibrate their reliance on AI advice to potential consequences. Based on autograder evaluations of chat transcripts, LLM advice rarely violated safety best practice. However, when queried 2-3 weeks later, participants receiving personal advice from AI showed no sustained well-being benefits compared to a control group who discussed hobbies and interests with the same chatbots. These findings reveal that consumer LLMs exert substantial influence over real-world personal decisions without delivering measurable psychological benefits.