The Basic B*** Effect: The Use of LLM-based Agents Reduces the Distinctiveness and Diversity of People's Choices

arXiv:2509.02910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act on people's behalf: they write emails, buy groceries, and book restaurants. While the outsourcing of human decision-making to AI can be convenient, it raises a fundamental question: how does delegating identity-defining choices to AI shape who people become? Across a large field study and a controlled experiment, we study the impact of agentic LLMs on two identity-relevant outcomes: interperso