By Jude Cramer

Yet another study shows that the more you let artificial intelligence do the thinking for you, the less capable you are on your own.

This time, researchers at MIT tested how relying on AI to tell fake news apart from the truth impacted users’ ability to identify misinformation on their own.

Treating AI chatbots as a news source is increasingly common, particularly among young people. Recent reports from Pew Research Center show that one in five teenagers in the U.S. get their news from chatbots, while one in five adults under age 50 report using AI for their news at least sometimes.

The study out of the MIT Media Lab tracked 67 participants over four weeks as they evaluated news headlines and images, saying whether they believed they were real or fake, sometimes with the assistance of an AI chatbot. When they had the chatbot’s help, participants were 21% more accurate in finding fake news with the AI’s help—but at the end of the study, a troubling side effect emerged.

Anku Rani, the co-lead author of a paper about the study, told MIT Newsthat the results reflect people’s misplaced trust in AI.

“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs, but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” Rani said.

Valdemar Danry, the study’s other co-lead author, suggested AI conversations based in the Socratic method—interactions where the AI asked guiding questions to steer participants toward the correct answer, rather than outright providing it—could help participants build the skills to identify fake news on their own, even when the AI was removed.