The consequences of relying on AI for accurate news

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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...

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