People Learn More Slowly From Chatbots Than Through Legacy Search

There sure are a lot of frivolous uses for AI these days, but one use that remains grounded in need (and real results) is the original ChatGPT functionality that started it all. Yes, the simple talk-and-respond chatbot remains the best public use case for AI in general, owed in part to arguments about public education and access to information.

Well, now it seems that even that might be overblown. A new paper has collected results from seven experiments with over 10,000 total participants and has come to the conclusion that learning with a chatbot leads to lower recall and shallower learning when compared to regular web search.

Now, it might seem odd to use regular web search as our "good" side of the coin here, since academia has spent decades vilifying it as the path to a paltry understanding. But it turns out that the proactive nature of web ...