Using AI for even 10 minutes significantly reduces your ability to stick with difficult tasks, according to a new study.
A range of experiments showed that people become less focused and able to persevere with hard tasks after just a small amount of time with artificial intelligence tools.
It is a “striking finding” that backs up many people’s feeling that relying on AI erodes our “cognitive fitness”, the researchers behind it claims. If we become used to AI giving us answers in seconds then thinking through them feels slow and inefficient, and it removes the feeling of “productive struggle” that can help people, they warn.
“We’ve built these systems to be helpful, but are they being helpful to us in a way that’s actually helping us?” said Brian Christian, from the University of California, Berkeley, who worked on the study. “We showed, ironically, that they are often helping us in ways that are kind of unhelpful.”
In the study, researchers design a set of different tests and recruited 1,222 participants online. They would be put through different trials to see how people’s focus and persistence was affected by using an AI tool.
In the first of them, 354 people were split up into two different groups and then were given 15 basic fraction problems. One group did the task without AI, but others were given access to ChatGPT.
After 12 problems, researchers then removed access to ChatGPT for the latter group. They had started off more accurate than the other group – but as soon as the AI assistance was removed, that flipped, and the latter group almost immediately stopped solving questions accurately.
Researchers then ran the experiment on a group of 667 more participants. once again, the AI users would get things wrong or give up entirely after their assistance was removed.
They then did a similar experiment, giving 201 participants a reading comprehension question from the SAT exams used to test for admission to university. Once again, giving a group AI access and then removing it meant that they would not persist and get more things wrong.
A paper describing the findings, ‘AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance’, is available online. An early version of it was circulated this year but it has since been finalised and was presented at a conference last week.
