Does artificial intelligence cause artificial confidence? Generative artificial intelligence as an emerging social referent.

people's self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities. This effect emerges for jokes, stories, poetry, and visual art, and it can consequently increase people's willingness to attempt the activity-even though the greater confidence underscoring their actions might be unwarranted. We further show that these effects emerge because gen-AI is perceived as a lower social referent for creative endeavors, bolstering people's own self-perceptions. As a result, for domains in which gen-AI is perceived as an equal or greater social referent (i.e., in fact-based domains), the effects are attenuated. These findings have significant implications for understanding human-AI interactions, antecedents for creative self-confidence, and the known referents that people use for social comparison effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).