LLM-group participants reported low ownership of their essays and fell behind in their ability to quote from essays written minutes earlier¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Reported ownership of essays was lowest in the LLM group, with Search Engine strong but lesser than Brain-only. → Nataliya Kosmyna 2025 q2 i? The LLM group was impaired in quoting from essays they had written just minutes prior. → Nataliya Kosmyna 2025

Evidence¶

Nataliya Kosmyna 2025¶

Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. Preprint, under review. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.08872

q2 · i? · causal · r1

Post-assessment interviews conducted after each session with participants in all three groups. The article reports that "The reported ownership of LLM group's essays in the interviews was low" and that the LLM group's quoting ability lagged the other groups. No effect sizes are printed for these interview findings.

"The reported ownership of LLM group's essays in the interviews was low. The Search Engine group had strong ownership, but lesser than the Brain-only group. The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Brain connectivity during essay writing systematically scales down with the amount of external support, with Brain-only strongest, Search Engine intermediate, and LLM weakest — related
• Essay quality was highest for AI-generated drafts and lowest with no AI, negatively correlated with ownership, suggesting an ownership-quality tradeoff. — related
• Over four months and four sessions, LLM-group participants performed worse than Brain-only participants at neural, linguistic, and scoring levels — related
• AI support shifts perceived attribution of ideas and text toward the AI, most strongly for AI-generated drafts, and an AI draft based on the writer's own outline contributed more ideas than expected (27%). — related
• Intensive LLM use in educational contexts may lead to an accumulation of cognitive debt that weakens critical thinking and epistemic ownership — a broader claim this one bears on