Ten Minutes of AI Help Made People Quit Hard Problems Sooner

In a Berkeley trial, people who leaned on a chatbot for just ten minutes skipped hard reading questions eight times as often once the help was gone. Ten Minutes of Chatbot Help and a Sixteen Point Drop: Berkeley Finds AI Assistance Erodes Persistence, October 11, 2026 A new peer reviewed study led by Brian Christian at UC Berkeley, presented at the Conference on Language Modeling, ran three randomized trials with 1,222 people and found that about ten minutes of leaning on a GPT 5 assistant ...