Using AI to Solve Problems May Weaken Your Skills When It's Not Available

A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA found that when people suddenly lost access to AI assistance during math and reading tasks, they performed worse and gave up more easily. The effect held across different types of problems. The finding raises a real question: does relying on AI tools improve what we can do right now, but make us worse at thinking through hard problems on our own later.