A recent paper makes a simple but unsettling claim: AI assistance improves performance in the moment but reduces persistence and weakens independent thinking almost immediately.
In controlled studies across math and reading tasks, participants who used AI performed better while it was available. But once it was removed, they did worse. And they were more likely to give up after about ten minutes!
The systems we are building today are optimized to help. Instantly. Completely. Without hesitation. But good teachers, mentors, and collaborators don’t work that way. They manage effort. They shape struggle. They know when not to answer.
AI doesn’t know how to do that.
This is something deeper than “deskilling.” It points to the erosion of persistence; the willingness to stay with a problem long enough to understand it. And persistence is not a side effect of learning. It’s the engine.
We’ve seen versions of this before. Calculators changed arithmetic. Search engines changed recall. But those tools didn’t close the loop. They didn’t finish the task for you. This generation of AI does.
That changes the dynamics.
If the default interaction is “ask a question, receive answer,” then over time the system trains us away from the behaviors required to improve our own thinking. The more effective the answer tool, the stronger the pull and more marked the effect.
This aligns with a point from my recent Thinking with Machines talk at Arc of AI. What we need is a different pattern: what I’m calling AI coaches.
AI coaches are design to not just respond, but guide. They ask for input before offering output. They break work into stages that follow our creative problem-solving thinking model: brainstorming, practice, execution.
The goal is not to slow things down for its own sake. It’s to preserve the conditions under which learning happens: effort, iteration, reflection.
This paper calls for AI systems that support long-term human capability, not just short-term success. That’s the right direction but it requires changing the interaction model itself. The kind of changes I designed into the AI Coaching system.
