Dialogues with AI Reduce Beliefs in Misinformation but Build No Lasting Discernment Skills
This addresses the challenge of training individuals to detect misinformation, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work showing AI reduces beliefs in misinformation.
The study tackled the problem of misinformation detection by examining whether AI-assisted discussions improve people's long-term discernment skills, finding that while AI assistance immediately boosted accuracy by 21%, unassisted performance declined by 15.3% over a month.
Given the growing prevalence of fake information, including increasingly realistic AI-generated news, there is an urgent need to train people to better evaluate and detect misinformation. While interactions with AI have been shown to durably reduce people's beliefs in false information, it is unclear whether these interactions also teach people the skills to discern false information themselves. We conducted a month-long study where 67 participants classified news headline-image pairs as real or fake, discussed their assessments with an AI system, followed by an unassisted evaluation of unseen news items to measure accuracy before, during, and after AI assistance. While AI assistance produced immediate improvements during AI-assisted sessions (+21\% average), participants' unassisted performance on new items declined significantly by 15.3\% in week 4 compared to week 0. These results indicate that while AI may help immediately, it ultimately degrades long-term misinformation detection abilities