AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

13 hours ago (arxiv.org)

"We recruited 354 US-based participants from the online research platform Prolific and paid them $2.60 for participation (our study took approximately 13 minutes to complete)."

Nah I'm good on this one. Gotta go back to Claude to reduce my persistence.

""Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes)."

  • Approximately 10 minutes is enough time to see the benefits but not the disadvantages. These effects might disappear again after multi-week interactions with AI, after it has led them down the wrong path, wasting hours; gaslit them into believing an incorrect solution is correct; or repeatedly misunderstood the problem.

    This initial honeymoon phase happens whenever someone starts using a new tool, fades after weeks or months, and and is not the time to evaluate the deleterious effects of the tool.