Just 10 minutes of AI use can hurt your thinking skills, study finds

AI is making many things easier in daily life, like people no longer need to spend hours listening to recordings just to write them down. If someone runs out of ideas then AI chatbots can quickly help with suggestions and brainstorming. Even though many studies say that depending too much on AI can have negative effects, AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are becoming more popular in every day life but at the same time new researches are warning that too much use of AI may affect the way people think.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Oxford, and University of California, Los Angeles say that using AI for even 10 minutes can affect how people think. Their study showed that even short use of AI may reduce a person’s ability to think clearly and solve problems by their own. Michiel Bakker who is an assistant professor at MIT involved with the study said “The takeaway is not that we should ban AI in education or workplaces.” According to Bakker, while AI can clearly help people to perform better in the moment, there is a need to be more careful about what kind of help AI provides and when.

The researchers asked people to solve different types of problems like simple maths and reading tasks through an online website where they were paid for their work. They carried out three separate tests with hundreds of participants. Some people were given AI tools that could solve problems for them. Later, when the AI tools were suddenly removed those people who depended on AI tools struggled more and made more mistakes some even gave up easily. The study showed that while AI can help people work faster, using it too much may weaken basic thinking and problem solving skills.

The findings come from a research paper called AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance published on arXiv. Along with Bakker, the study was written by Grace Liu, Brian Christian, Tsvetomira Dumbalska, and Rachit Dubey. The study found that after using AI for only about 10 minutes many people became more likely to give up on problems and performed worse when the AI was no longer available. This mostly happened with participants who asked AI to directly solve tasks for them. But people who used AI only for small hints or explanations did not show the same problem. The researchers also said this effect was not limited to one type of task it could happen in many kinds of problem solving situations.

According to a report, Bakker became interested in studying how AI may slowly weaken people’s abilities after reading an essay about the long term effects of AI on humans. The essay explained that the danger may not come from AI suddenly taking control. Instead, as AI keeps becoming more powerful little by little and people may slowly become too dependent on it and lose some control and independence over time.

The essay and the research studies suggest that AI should not only help people work faster but also support the development of their thinking and learning skills. Bakker believes the issue is mainly about how people think, learn, stay motivated, and deal with challenges. He said, “We wanted to take these broader concerns about long-term human-AI interaction and study them in a controlled experimental setting,” 

The MIT researcher said the results of the study were worrying. He explained that continuing to work on problems is very important for learning new skills and improving the ability to learn over time. In the experiment, many people stopped trying to solve problems as soon as their AI assistants were removed, which showed how dependent they had become with AI tools. Bakker supports a different way of using AI, where the focus is not only on giving quick answers but also on helping people learn and think better. He said that AI tools which directly solve problems for users may affect people differently in the long run compared to AI systems that guide, teach, or challenge users to think on their own.

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