AI assistance provides no significant overall time savings and can slow completion on easy task variants, with chat-interface friction (prompting time) dominating on trivial tasks¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · causal r3 · q3
Currency · newest study 2026 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 2 of 2 entries) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Across all tasks, AI assistance did not significantly reduce completion time, and on easy task variants AI-assisted completion was 10.0 seconds slower than independent completion. → Sunny Yu 2026 q3 i? In Study 1, AI users showed no time savings and reported higher mental effort than independent completers. → Sunny Yu 2026 (2)

Evidence¶

Sunny Yu 2026¶

Sunny Yu, Myra Cheng, Ahmad Jabbar, Ilia Sucholutsky, Katherine M. Collins, Dan Jurafsky, Robert D. Hawkins. (2026). The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22687 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.22687

q3 · i? · causal · r3

Study 2 completion sample (N=1001) with hidden timers and GPT-4o chat interface. The article decomposes AI-assisted time into prompting, model response, and processing, finding "prompting (48.7 seconds) took significantly longer than response processing (37.6 seconds)".

"Across all tasks, AI assistance did not significantly reduce completion time overall (β= 6.17,p= 0.07). A decomposition of the AI-assisted completion time reveals that this is because current chat-interface friction dominates on trivial tasks, leading to a slow-down effect where AI-assisted completion times is longer than the independent completion by 10.0 seconds on easy task variants (from 60.2 seconds for independent to 70.2 seconds for AI-assisted;p <0.05)."

Sunny Yu 2026 (2)¶

Sunny Yu, Myra Cheng, Ahmad Jabbar, Ilia Sucholutsky, Katherine M. Collins, Dan Jurafsky, Robert D. Hawkins. (2026). The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22687

q3 · i? · causal · r3

Study 1 (N=498) recorded hidden-timer completion times and NASA-TLX effort per task. The article reports no significant time difference and higher effort for AI-assisted completion; Study 3 replicated that AI users spent 7.06 seconds more.

"for time, there is no significant difference (β=−5.6,p= 0.10); for effort, people who completed tasks independently actually reported lower mental effort (1.99 for independent vs. 2.11 for AI-assisted on a 7-point scale) than those who used AI (β=−0.12,p<0.01)."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Time and Continuity — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• People significantly underestimate AI-assisted completion times on simple cognitive tasks, even though AI assistance saves little or no actual time (the speedup illusion) — related
• AI assistance sped up only difficult tasks and only a few individual tasks, not easy ones — related
• Prior AI use carries over: brief AI exposure increases subsequent AI adoption and exacerbates the speedup illusion, while independent exposure does not reduce AI use — related
• AI assistance reduces subjective mental effort across all tasks even when it does not reduce completion time, dissociating time and effort — related
• Chat-log analysis indicates lower-education participants obtain substantial assistance from AI while higher-education participants use the tool somewhat more effectively across several margins, explaining why the gap narrows but does not disappear — related
• The most significant reported benefit of AI in instructional design is assistance with administrative and repetitive tasks (18 of 28 studies, 64.2%) — related
• Educators benefit from AI chatbots through time-saving administrative assistance and improved pedagogy — reports the opposite
• Adding friction to objectively meaningless tasks increases their appraised sense of purpose and meaning — related
• People expect AI assistance to save far more time than assistance from another highly intelligent human participant — related
• Prompting is a major source of AI-assisted cognitive effort: copying prompts reduces effort but not time, and verbose model responses can make AI-assisted completion slower than predicted — related
• Educators did not perceive the iterative CTML review process as slowing them down, rating production efficiency at 4.26/5 — related