It’s no secret that the last few years have seen a massive explosion in the use of artificial intelligence for general information-gathering. An even more recent trend, though, is how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly being used for verifying and consuming news; reports from the Pew Research Center over the last year found that one-in-five U.S. teens regularly use LLMs to get their news, while one-in-four young adults have reported using them for that purpose at least once.

A new open-access study from the MIT Media Lab should give some of those users pause: Researchers found that, over the course of a month, participants who relied on AI systems to verify facts actually got worse at detecting misinformation on their own when their chatbots were taken away.

This phenomenon, which is often referred to as the “AI dependency paradox,” has been observed in a wide range of knowledge domains, like the 2025 study that found that doctors who used AI got worse at detecting cancer on their own. The dynamic mirrors broader tech trends around so-called “deskilling” (or “cognitive offloading”) that have been well-documented for decades, from calculators weakening our math skills to Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies impacting our natural sense of direction.

In the new Media Lab study, which tracked 67 people over four weeks as they evaluated news headline-image pairs, participants were 21 percent more accurate in detecting fake news when assisted by an AI chatbot during a session — confirming previous research out of the MIT Sloan School of Management demonstrating that AI can be an effective tool in reducing people’s beliefs in false information.

However, the study showed that a new wrinkle emerged when the AI was no longer present: By week four, participants’ unassisted performance on new news items declined by 15 percentage points compared to before the study started. (Roughly a quarter of all participants actually reported feeling that they were getting better at detection, even as their performance declined.)

Dunning-Kruger creeps in

“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs, but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence [of letters/words],” says MIT media arts and sciences (MAS) PhD student Anku Rani, co-lead author of a new paper about the research, alongside fellow MAS PhD student Valdemar Danry. “Many impressive behaviors emerge from scaling this, but it comes with real limitations, both in what the model can reliably generate and in its broader impact on the people using it.”

Qualitative analysis identified distinct behavioral patterns, with the team labeling one-fifth of all participants as "Dependency Developers” who gradually shifted from active self-reliance to passive acceptance of AI guidance.

In the post-experiment survey, one respondent explicitly acknowledged this transition, noting their passive role in the process. “While [the chatbots] did emphasize that you must check across multiple sources to make sure a story is true, they didn’t teach me much about exploring the context of the images themselves,” the participant said.

The research team said that these AI models are particularly vulnerable to mistakes in the midst of emotionally charged breaking news, as exhibited by the widespread misinformation that accompanied President Trump’s recent assassination attempt and major events during the Iranian war. (The authors also point out that the original human-created news content that’s used to train the AI models is increasingly unreliable and/or biased, further exacerbating the problem.)

The paper, which Danry and Rani presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, was co-authored by Assistant Professor Paul Pu Liang, Senior Research Scientist Andrew Lippman, and senior author Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

The solution: Being a coach, not a crutch

The researchers say that the results of their project suggest that the specific way in which an AI interacts with a user determines whether its impact will be “as a coach, versus as a crutch.” The study found a clear distinction between conversational strategies that simply help in the moment and those that actually support active learning and skill development.

For the latter, the Media Lab team uncovered several strategies associated with stronger independent detection later on, even if the strategies initially slowed down performance during the interaction. This included the Socratic method of the AI asking guided questions, as well as so-called “deep probing,” where the system provides gently persuasive statements if the user appears to be veering away from the correct response.

“AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”

Rani noted a few key limitations to the one-month study, from the small dataset of roughly 50 validated news items to the demographic focus on the United States and the United Kingdom. In the future, she says that the team hopes to do similar experiments with more geographically diverse cohorts, including low-resource communities, and is also eager to explore whether other multi-modal interaction strategies — like interacting with culturally adaptive digital twins instead of text-based chatbots — help people improve their abilities to detect misinformation.

At a higher level, the researchers hope that the project will be something that educators can examine as they develop teaching plans that incorporate AI tools into their school curricula.

“It’s especially important to raise awareness in our schools and academic communities about the shortcomings of using AI as learning tools,” says Maes. “People need to know that if they ‘delegate’ their thinking, they’re not going to get better at that particular brand of problem-solving. Ultimately, the ability to question and analyze information is important for everyone, because it empowers us to solve problems and form our own independent opinions about the world.”

Danry adds that the rapidly-evolving field of machine learning and deep learning will require continuous education on the benefits and drawbacks of LLMs.

“There’s a lot of work to do in making sure that we don’t just fully offload critical tasks that we want to be able to keep on doing to these models,” he says. “We need to develop a new kind of AI literacy.”

The research project was supported, in part, by the Media Lab Consortium, an MIT Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship, and a Google PhD Fellowship in Human–Computer Interaction.

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