This article is a good example of why it's important not to generalize from a single study. Here's the story the study presents: "compared with those who used ChatGPT, participants who used Google search invested more effort in gathering and synthesizing information, as manifested in more time spent on the search task. This greater search effort led participants to develop deeper knowledge from their search, as manifested in greater felt learning from the search results, greater felt ownership over the knowledge they acquired, and thinking that the search results contained more comprehensive information on the subject." Now, is the effect the result of using AI? Or is it a result of different sources found through each search. I find Perplexity, for example, doesn't discriminate in search results the way I do when using Google. I skip over the churnalism, for example, while Perplexity does not. If I'm using Google Scholar, this distinction is even more pronounced. This study doesn't really trace the difference in effort to the cause, so it just blames the result on AI when it could be an entirely different factor. As the papers so often conclude, more research is needed.
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