Success with AI depends more on how you interact with it than on the model itself: active collaboration and critical feedback lead to better results, even if they surface more failures along the way.
This paper analyzes 27K AI conversations to show that skilled AI users get better results by actively iterating with the AI, while novices passively accept outputs—leading to a paradox where fluent users see more visible failures but achieve better outcomes on complex tasks, while novices experience hidden failures that go unnoticed.