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  • Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
    by atkrista
  • This is just our energy conservation system in practice. It happens every time we experience and easier/better way of doing something. Another version of this headline could have been "Experiencing VIP treatment for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to tolerate the normal shit you have to put up with"
    by Eddy_Viscosity2
  • This behavior is not very surprising to me, and I think the conclusion is a bit off. Here is an analogous study:

    Participants are asked to drive 20 nails into a plank of wood. Group A is given a hammer and an unripe banana. Group B is given only a banana. Halfway through the experiment, the hammers are taken away.

    Hammers erode your ability to persist at hard things…

    My point being that AI is a new tool that allows us to work on harder things at a higher level. It’s like having a team of 100 skilled workers with nail guns (and all manner of other tools) that never tire, and you get to direct them. Once you experience that, it’s a bit disheartening to go back to building alone with your bare hands… even if you lament the decline in your hand-eye coordination.

    by justin_murray
  • I find that this is noticeable in situations where you're working on something a bit more complex and are initially using an LLM as code assistant to make progress. Once it hits a wall and you find yourself needing to just figure it out yourself, man does the debt get paid with interest. It's not a permanent cognitive impairment though. But there is a bit of a recovery period needed. On the whole I think there are some productivity gains, in spite of setbacks (assuming you know how to solve the problems yourself, to begin with)
    by dcanelhas
  • Wouldn't it have been more useful/conclusive if the study had another control group or two with non-AI based assistance (access to math books, access to calculator, access to human experts, etc)?
    by imeanwhatdoikno
  • This has not been true in my experience. The bar of what is possible has been moved dramatically. So my daily quest is not to continue to achieve our old objectives, but rethink worthy objectives for our new tools.
    by peteridah
  • This also happened with the introduction of TV.

    https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/town-without-television...

    And the IQs of those born after 1975 via the reverse Flynn Affect, those who had these devices of consumption and easy answers such as TV, and later Social Media, AI, etc has been decreasing.

    I can only imagine a further and speedier decline will happen, and is happening.

    by tarkin2
  • The article title is not supported by the evidence presented in the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721).

    The evidence for reduced persistence is kinda weak.

    The strongest experimental result in the paper is: if people use AI to help solve a series of problems, and then the AI is suddenly taken away, they perform worse on subsequent problems than people who hadn't been using AI for the earlier questions.

    But:

    - They're looking at really really short-term effects, like seconds or minutes. That's not really interesting if we care about long term effects (which is what the abstract says is important).

    - What they found is totally expected and isn't something I'd worry about: it's kind of expected that if one guy warms up with 10 questions done himself, and the other guy warms up with 10 questions delegated to AI, then the second guy is going to do worse on the final 10 questions (because he didn't warm up).

    by rahimnathwani

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