this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu)
submitted 1 day ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] ejs@piefed.social 10 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Forgive me, but i’m not understanding why you find the headline to sensationalize or over state the actual findings of the study. The abstract of the paper directly says:

we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance.

I’m struggling to discern a meaningful difference between “erodes your ability to persist at hard things” and “reduced persistence of unassisted performance”. Forgive me for not understanding but I would appreciate your explanation. The paper's very own conclusion actually uses the term erosion:

Here, we show that AI interaction can result in significant impairments in independent performance and persistence – capacities that are foundational to life-long learning. If brief exposure produces measurable erosion, the cumulative effects of daily AI use over months or years may be profound and difficult to reverse

I found a definition of erosion: "the gradual loss of something as a result of an ongoing process". Trust can erode and be rebuilt; soil can erode and be restored.

I agree that 10 mins of foundation model assistance likely doesn’t “permanently damage your brain or destroy your ability to think for yourself”. However, in my reading of the Berkeley news piece, I find no claim of this specific kind. Does the text of the press release explicitly claim the duration of effect is long-term or lasting? Does it explicitly claim the the erosion is permanent? Again, I find myself confused what you are arguing against.

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world -1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Of course I'll be happy to explain, the title of the article states:

Using Al for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News

The findings of the study do not indicate that using an LLM (AI) for ten minutes removes your ability to do hard things. The study showed that it was harder to perform tasks without AI assistance after having access to it. In fact, people who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not.

The ten minutes was simply used as a control so that everyone had the same amount of time with AI. It had nothing to do with the erosion of their ability to perform difficult tasks. The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people's ability to perform harder tasks without assistance.

The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded. Therefore, the title has been intentionally sensationalized as clickbait. It objectively misrepresents the findings by encouraging a different interpretation and conclusion than what the study actually demonstrated.

The study itself is interesting, but apparently, the researchers' findings weren't sensational enough on their own. The people posting these articles still felt the need to mislead their audiences into drawing a different conclusion from the one the research actually supports.

[–] ejs@piefed.social 7 points 9 hours ago

"The study doesn't show it removes the ability to do hard things" Again, who exactly are you arguing against? Nobody said this... Neither the press release nor I

"People who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not." I'd gently encourage a quick re-read of the paper, as the statistic results directly contradict your claim. Here's experiment 1 (fraction math problems):
image

The solve rate measures the rate at which the participants correctly solved the problem, and the skip rate measures the rate at which the participants chose to skip the problem rather than inputting an answer. We observe that with AI assistance (i.e., the first 12 problems), participants in the AI condition were significantly more likely to solve problems correctly and less likely to give up compared to the control participants. However, when the AI was removed, their performance dropped and they were also less likely to persist with problems (as seen by the increased skip rate). Here's experiment 2 (same fraction problems, but with an added pretest): image Finally, experiment 3 (SAT-style reading comprehension): image To clarify, people who used AI did worse than the people who never used AI on the test.

"The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded" and Again, just to make sure we aren't proceeding on a misunderstanding here, the headline says "persist", which means to refusing to give up. The definition of persist is not that of perform. Further, I suggest you re-read the research paper. The abstract directly states, "impairment of unassisted performance"

"The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people’s ability to perform harder tasks without assistance." I think you may be confused about how experimental studies work in research. In the experiment, when they controlled the variable of AI assistance, the experimental results showed statistically significant results proving the hypothesis that test solve rate of the control group was greater than the test solve rate of the AI group.