Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves. As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content – but there’s a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests. An over-dependence on AI to help figure out what’s real on the internet can lead to trouble making those judgments. During the four-week study, released in April , researchers tracked 67 participants and quizzed them on whether pairs of news-related headlines and images were real. They found that AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT would be useful for detecting fake news – but when participants relied on them too much, they became worse at spotting misinformation. Researchers also found that when it came to deciding which news headlines and images were real, AI often prioritized an accurate response, rather than cultivating an ability to think. This dependency could actually worsen judgment in the long-term, according to the study . “When we’re interacting with AI, we feel we’re becoming better at certain tasks and there’s enough research that shows we are not,” says Anku Rani, a PhD student at MIT and co-lead author of the study. …