AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

arxiv.org

20 points·dougb5··4 comments

"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.

The AI marketing just need the publicity people generate during the honeymoon phase. Falling out is generally gradual and typically in silence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com