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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

The article title is not supported by the evidence presented in the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721).

The evidence for reduced persistence is kinda weak.

The strongest experimental result in the paper is: if people use AI to help solve a series of problems, and then the AI is suddenly taken away, they perform worse on subsequent problems than people who hadn't been using AI for the earlier questions.

But:

- They're looking at really really short-term effects, like seconds or minutes. That's not really interesting if we care about long term effects (which is what the abstract says is important).

- What they found is totally expected and isn't something I'd worry about: it's kind of expected that if one guy warms up with 10 questions done himself, and the other guy warms up with 10 questions delegated to AI, then the second guy is going to do worse on the final 10 questions (because he didn't warm up).

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With enough time the rot becomes not just reflexive but moral.

Eventually you think you deserve to have the answer just handed to you without having done any of the work.

maybe! but the linked paper doesn't show that

More like I have done the work, we all have. Then it was stolen and sold back to us, with the openly stated goal of devaluing our labor. I can understand a bit of entitlement here.

i dont expect, and wont allow IT be it people or AI defining what my morals should be

Oh, excuse us for expecting some form of shared morality. We didn’t mean to intrude in your one-person show.

Nothing to excuse because thats not what i am asking humans to do, i will never in my life, and i mean it i would rather a clanker kills me, accept a tool telling me what if "feels (what a joke) is correct. i suppose you are a human so no issue there, if you are a clanker, get out of society talk

> - What they found is totally expected and isn't something I'd worry about: it's kind of expected that if one guy warms up with 10 questions done himself, and the other guy warms up with 10 questions delegated to AI, then the second guy is going to do worse on the final 10 questions (because he didn't warm up).

I agree with your general conclusion, but with this point, the solve rate for the AI group once AI is removed is lower than the initial solve rate for the other group in all the experiments (or at least definitely in 2 of 3), so I don't think it's explained by a warm-up.

Right but the later questions are harder than the earlier ones.

From page 4:

  Problem difficulty increased across the experiment from one-step1 (problems 1–4) to two-step2 (problems 5–8) to three-step3 (problems 9–12).

From page 6:

  Problems increased in difficulty from one-step (problems 4-6) to two-step (problems 7-10) to three-step (problems 11-14) problems.

The fact that the AI group did worse on the harder problems than the non-AI group did on the easier ones doesn't tell us anything.

Sort of like if you're sawing boards with a handsaw, and then they give you an electric saw but that fails coincidentally, and you don't expend effort because why not wait for the electric saw to be fixed?

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