Education
3 items across 3 editions · appeared in the last 3 editions in a row. First seen Sun 13 Sep, last seen Tue 15 Sep.
- Epoch AI, publishing on 14 September, reports that the share of US adults who used AI on 6–7 days in the previous week rose from 8.2% in March 2026 (90% CI 7.2–9.3) to 18.7% in August 2026 (90% CI 16.7–20.8). Any weekly AI use rose from 50.0% to 56.4%, and the share using AI on just one day fell from 17.3% to 10.1%.
- The figures come from two Epoch AI/Ipsos surveys of US adults on Ipsos' KnowledgePanel, fielded 3–5 March 2026 (n=2,017, 1,028 AI users) and 28–30 August 2026 (n=1,016, 574 AI users), weighted to represent US adults aged 18 and over.
- Epoch flags its own comparability problem: "The days of use question changed between waves, in two ways." March asked one overall question with three bands; August asked per-service day counts from 1 to 7 and Epoch took the maximum across services, which it says "may understate frequency relative to an overall-use question". Epoch concludes "comparisons of frequency across the two waves are approximate".
- The two waves are separate samples rather than the same people tracked over time, so the result is a population-level shift, not a measurement of individuals changing their behaviour.
- "Informational Help-Seeking on Reddit Did Not Decline After ChatGPT" (arXiv 2609.12447, submitted 11 September, announced 14 September) by Hazem Ibrahim and Yasir Zaki tracks monthly post counts in 26 Reddit informational communities against 90 size-comparable hobby communities over the same six calendar months before and after ChatGPT's launch, and repeats the analysis at 66 earlier dates as a placebo.
- The abstract states: "Our results rule out any decline in posting larger than 3.4%, far smaller than the 8% to 25% declines documented in prior work."
- The authors scored 274,411 posts and 223,775 comments with AI-text detectors and report that "AI-written posts rose only 2-3 percentage points more in informational communities than in hobby communities, short of the 5.1 points that would be needed to hide even the smallest decline previously reported for Reddit". They attribute earlier findings to community types already drifting apart before ChatGPT existed.
- Preprint, not peer reviewed. The study covers one platform over a six-month window around launch and relies on AI-text detectors whose false positives it cancels statistically rather than validates directly. The authors report their own largest estimate — an 18% fall in posts to low-stakes curiosity communities — matches that group's pre-existing trend.
- The Decoder, publishing on 13 September, reports a randomised controlled trial by Thibault Schrepel of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam comparing three groups — no ChatGPT access, unguided AI suggestions, and structured prompt-engineering training — with 66 students in 2024 and 164 in 2025.
- The group without AI scored lowest on both the in-class assignment and the take-home exam in both years. Schrepel, who had expected unguided use to hurt performance, is quoted saying: "I was wrong."
- The trained group scored well above the other two in 2024, but by 2025 that advantage had almost closed and all three groups performed at roughly the same level. The Decoder reports Schrepel attributes this to growing familiarity with chatbots.
- Limitations stated in the article: a small sample, students already enrolled in an AI course and so likely more tech-savvy than average, and no way to verify how much AI students actually used during take-home exams. The underlying paper is on SSRN and was not accessible for this edition, so these figures come from The Decoder's report.