Expert AI users actually fail more often than beginners because they push the machine to its absolute breaking point.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
A paradox of AI fluency
arXiv · 2604.25905
The Takeaway
Fluent users experience more visible errors because they attempt complex tasks and engage in constant iterative refinement. Novices suffer from invisible failures where the output looks correct but is actually riddled with hidden mistakes. A high error rate in an AI session is often a proxy for high-level utility and expert performance. People typically assume that a smooth and error-free experience indicates a successful interaction. This research suggests that if your AI never makes a mistake, you probably are not doing anything useful with it.
From the 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 pass