Yet another study shows that the more you let artificial intelligence do the thinking for you, the less capable you are on your own.
This time, researchers at MIT tested how relying on AI to tell fake news apart from the truth impacted users’ ability to identify misinformation on their own.
Treating AI chatbots as a news source is increasingly common, particularly among young people. Recent reports from Pew Research Center show that one in five teenagers in the U.S. get their news from chatbots, while one in five adults under age 50 report using AI for their news at least sometimes.
The study out of the MIT Media Lab tracked 67 participants over four weeks as they evaluated news headlines and images, saying whether they believed they were real or fake, sometimes with the assistance of an AI chatbot. When they had the chatbot’s help, participants were 21% more accurate in finding fake news with the AI’s help—but at the end of the study, a troubling side effect emerged.
By week four of the study, participants’ unassisted ability to identify fake news had declined by 15 percentage points compared to their scores before the experiment started. Their confidence, however, increased: a quarter of participants said they felt their detection abilities had improved, even as their performance got worse.
Anku Rani, the co-lead author of a paper about the study, told MIT News that the results reflect people’s misplaced trust in AI.
“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs, but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” Rani said. “Many impressive behaviors emerge from scaling this, but it comes with real limitations, both in what the model can reliably generate and in its broader impact on the people using it.”
AI and cognitive decline
This study is far from the first to show that relying on AI negatively impacts cognitive ability. A recent May study that saw using AI for just a 10-minute period left study participants less able to solve math problems and SAT-style reading questions.
Then there are studies about doctors who lost their ability to detect cancer independently, data workers whose critical thinking skills deteriorated, and essay writers whose brain activity declined, all after becoming reliant on AI assistance to complete tasks.
Taken together, these studies point to what’s known as the “AI dependency paradox,” where humans’ skills initially improve when assisted by AI, only to fall below their previous baseline when that AI help is removed.
A smarter way to use AI
Though the study should give pause to those relying on AI to distinguish real news from fake, it adds that there are still ways AI can help without sacrificing your own judgment skills in the process.
Valdemar Danry, the study’s other co-lead author, suggested AI conversations based in the Socratic method—interactions where the AI asked guiding questions to steer participants toward the correct answer, rather than outright providing it—could help participants build the skills to identify fake news on their own, even when the AI was removed.
“AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” Danry said. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”
“There’s a lot of work to do in making sure that we don’t just fully offload critical tasks that we want to be able to keep on doing to these models,” he added. “We need to develop a new kind of AI literacy.”