这篇论文戳破了AI“效率神话”的泡沫——你以为省了1分钟，实际只省了7秒，做AI产品、写提示词、或者日常依赖AI的开发者，看完会重新审视自己的使用习惯。
MIT、斯坦福、纽约大学和普林斯顿联合发表论文，发现人们在使用AI时会产生“效率增益错觉”——即使实际效率提升很小甚至为负，仍感觉AI节省了大量时间。在2691名参与者的三项预注册实验中，人们高估了AI对简单任务（如算术、拼写、回忆、短改写）的节省时间，平均预期节省55.7秒，实际仅7.5秒。研究指出，AI使用的隐性成本在于界面摩擦（写提示、等待、检查等），而非智能不足。更关键的是，AI使用会自我强化：仅使用两次后，参与者就更倾向于再次使用AI，即使自己完成更快。这种依赖并非戏剧性的，而是悄无声息地重新校准了人们对自身能力的判断。
New paper from MIT, Stanford, New York Univ, Princ…
New paper from MIT, Stanford, New York Univ, Princeton.
AI can make people feel more efficient even when they are not actually becoming much more efficient.
that people often use AI for simple tasks because it feels like it saves time and effort, but the measured benefit is often tiny, missing, or even negative.
The biggest point is the feedback loop: once people use AI, they become more likely to use it again, even for easy tasks where doing it themselves would often be just as fast or faster.
i.e. AI dependence can grow from a mistaken feeling of convenience, not just from real productivity gains.
Across three preregistered studies with 2,691 participants, people used AI for basic arithmetic, spelling, recall, and short rewriting at higher rates than they predicted, especially on easy tasks.
They also expected AI to save 55.7 seconds on average, when the measured saving was only 7.5 seconds.
For simple work, the hidden cost is not intelligence but interface friction: writing the prompt, waiting, reading, checking, and deciding whether the answer is acceptable.
Once that loop begins, it can feel like effort has been outsourced, even when effort has only been rearranged.
Here’s the key part: the study suggests that AI use can train its own justification.
After using AI on just two tasks, participants became more likely to use it again, even when independent completion was faster.
The danger is not dramatic dependence, but quiet recalibration.
A person who asks AI for a trivial answer today may not become less capable tomorrow, but they may become less accurate at judging when their own mind is already the faster tool.
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Paper Link – arxiv. org/abs/2605.22687
Paper Title: "The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks"