{"ID":2850804,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08937","arxiv_id":"2512.08937","title":"When AI Gives Advice: Evaluating AI and Human Responses to Online Advice-Seeking for Well-Being","abstract":"Seeking advice is a core human behavior that the internet has reinvented twice: first through forums and Q\u0026A communities that crowdsource public guidance, and now through large language models (LLMs). Yet the quality of this LLM advice for everyday well-being scenarios remains unclear. How does it compare, not only against human comments, but against the wisdom of the online crowd? We ran two studies (N=210) in which experts compared top-voted Reddit advice with LLM-generated advice. LLMs ranked significantly higher overall and on effectiveness, warmth, and willingness to seek advice again. GPT-4o beat GPT-5 on all metrics except sycophancy, suggesting that benchmark gains need not improve advice-giving. In Study-2, we examined how human and algorithmic advice could be combined, and found that human advice can be unobtrusively polished to compete with AI-generated comments. We conclude with design implications for advice-giving agents and ecosystems blending AI, crowd input, and expert oversight.","short_abstract":"Seeking advice is a core human behavior that the internet has reinvented twice: first through forums and Q\u0026A communities that crowdsource public guidance, and now through large language models (LLMs). Yet the quality of this LLM advice for everyday well-being scenarios remains unclear. How does it compare, not only aga...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08937","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08937v2","authors":"[\"Harsh Kumar\",\"Jasmine Chahal\",\"Yinuo Zhao\",\"Zeling Zhang\",\"Annika Wei\",\"Louis Tay\",\"Ashton Anderson\"]","published":"2025-10-24T18:02:51Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CY\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}