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LLMs as Oracles: Reliance on LLMs for Subjective Personal Questions

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 13, 2026 · UTC

We characterize how people are turning to LLMs as oracles: all-knowing authorities on subjective personal questions. Motivated by risks to users' autonomy and well-being, we develop a typology and LLM-based methods to measure this form of AI reliance at scale and understand how people are offloading judgment and decision-making to AI. Applying our typology to public usage data (68K prompts from WildChat and ThoughtTrace), we find that LLM-as-oracle use has increased over time (2023-2026) and is more prevalent among younger users. We further build a privacy-preserving data donation tool to anal

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