The Good Thing About Hard Things

A new research paper titled “​AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance,”​ which was recently presented at the ​Conference on Language Modeling​, has been attracting attention. It explores an obvious question: do AI tools negatively affect your ability to think? It does so with a simple experimental design: participants were divided into two groups tasked with solving a series of math problems involving fractions. One group had to find answers on their own, while the other used ChatGPT to help. At first, the ChatGPT group performed better, which is not surprising because LLMs are good at solving math problems. But then the researchers turned off the chatbot. Not only did the AI group’s accuracy fall below the control group, but many participants in the AI group gave up and started skipping questions altogether. ​AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance​ The researchers repeated the same experiment several more times, including one…