How will superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) affect human decision making? And what will be the mechanisms behind this effect? We address these questions in a domain where AI already exceeds human performance, analyzing more than 5.8 million move decisions made by professional Go players over the past 71 years (1950-2021). To address the first question, we use a superhuman AI program to estimate the quality of human decisions across time, generating 58 billion counterfactual game patterns and comparing the win rates of actual human decisions with those of counterfactual AI decisions. We find that humans began to make significantly better decisions following the advent of superhuman AI. We then examine human players' strategies across time and find that novel decisions (i.e., previously unobserved moves) occurred more frequently and became associated with higher decision quality after the advent of superhuman AI. Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making.
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