AI could be doing to our tolerance for hard work what social media did to our patience

It is no secret that social media, and especially the rise of short-form content, has played a major role in the declining patience many of us have for anything that takes too long to get to the point. A few seconds without something interesting happening is enough to make us swipe away and look for the next thing. AI appears to be doing something similar to the way we approach work.

A new peer-reviewed study found that people who used AI for around 10 to 15 minutes were more likely to struggle and give up once the AI was taken away. The researchers ran three randomized experiments with 1,222 participants who were given math and reading-comprehension tasks. AI helped them perform better at first, but their performance tanked once they had to solve the problems on their own.

Researchers think one explanation for this could be that AI answers queries so quickly that it can start changing our expectations of how much time and effort a difficult task should take. Once we get used to instant results, doing the same without help could feel a lot more frustrating than it used to.

AI could be messing with what feels like normal effort

Think about how most people use AI at work. Something that would usually take several minutes or even hours of researching, figuring out, and putting together now gets reduced to a prompt and a few seconds of waiting.

Researchers argue that this speed can change the reference point for how long a task should take. Unaided work then starts to feel more demanding, even though the task itself has not changed. The study states that after AI was removed, participants who had been using it skipped 20% of the remaining problems, compared with 11% among people who never had AI assistance. Their solve rate also fell to 57%, compared with 73% for the control group.

The study also points to “productive struggle,” or the effort that goes into figuring something out yourself. Researchers argue that working through difficult problems helps build persistence and teaches us what we can actually do without help. AI can remove much of that struggle by giving us the answer almost instantly.

There is one important catch

The findings sound grim, but the research does not prove that AI permanently destroys our patience for hard work. Participants were tested immediately after AI access was removed. Researchers still don’t know whether the effect lasts a few minutes, several hours, or days. They also cannot say whether daily AI use makes it worse over time.