Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.

ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.

Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)

[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response

When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:

Workplace Example

Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.

Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.

Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.

> sometimes struggle to break automatic habits

The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.

Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)