Next time you’re about to ask an AI chatbot to help you solve a hard problem, you might want to slow your roll.
People who waited to consult an AI chatbot until they had partially worked through a problem on their own performed better on a critical thinking task than those who used the chatbot from the start, researchers reported April 14 at the 2026 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona. Under tight deadlines, though, using AI early in the process did provide a boost, highlighting a trade-off between speed and independent reasoning, and raising questions about how and when we should use chatbots.