Study Finds Brief AI Help Can Reduce Persistence on Later Tasks

A study of 1,222 people found that after brief AI-assisted problem-solving sessions, participants performed worse and skipped more questions when asked to continue without AI. The experiments covered fraction problems and reading comprehension, and the effects appeared after roughly 10 minutes of assistance. The paper reports three randomized experiments in which AI access improved performance during the assisted phase, but that advantage reversed when the tool was removed.