Ten minutes with AI makes people give up faster when the AI is gone

A study of 1,222 people found that using AI assistance for just 10 minutes makes people worse at solving problems on their own afterward — they give up sooner and perform significantly worse without it. This matters because persistence is how people actually learn skills, not just complete tasks.

The study shows a concrete cost to the way AI systems are built right now. Current AI is optimized to give you the answer immediately, which trains your brain to expect instant solutions. The moment you face a problem without AI, you've lost the habit of working through difficulty. This is particularly sharp because the effect shows up after only brief exposure — you don't need months of AI use to degrade your own problem-solving. The implication is blunt: if AI becomes the default tool for knowledge work, the people using it most will become less capable when they're forced to work without it. That's a structural problem with how the tools are designed, not a problem with the users.