Ten minutes of AI use reduces persistence, new study finds

Just ten minutes of working with artificial intelligence tools is enough to make people less focused and less persistent when facing difficult tasks, a new study says. The researchers called the result remarkable.

According to the authors, the explanation is simple: once you get used to receiving answers from AI within seconds, searching for them yourself starts to feel slow and inefficient. The sense of “productive struggle” that helps people achieve results disappears along with it.

How the experiment worked

The study involved 1,222 volunteers. In the first test, 354 people were split into two groups, and both solved 15 simple fraction problems. Only one group was allowed to use ChatGPT. After 12 completed problems, the AI group lost access. They had worked noticeably faster with the assistant, but as soon as it was taken away, mistakes appeared almost immediately, along with an inability to finish the tasks.

A similar experiment was run with 667 other participants, using somewhat different tasks. Here too, AI users began to make clear mistakes once the tool was switched off and struggled to complete the tasks, and some gave up right away. In the final part of the work, the remaining 201 participants read and comprehended a text similar to those found in university entrance exams. The results were again very similar.

What the researchers say

“As humanity, we built AI systems to be useful. But are they useful in a way that actually helps us?” asked Brian Christian of the University of California, Berkeley. He told the British publication that the study ironically showed that AI helps in a way that ends up not helping.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz