Anti-LLM Sentiment Considered Harmful

Ambrose:

there are studies coming out

I’m pretty sure I already linked it here, but https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721

Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N = 1, 222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (∼10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.

What I find particularly annoying about this is, that many acknowledge the problem, but then deflect and say it’s primarily an issue with “kids”. No, it’s not. It’s just infinitely worse for them.