The condition is described as mental fatigue that can occur when people use AI tools to an extent that exceeds their cognitive capacity. Symptoms can include mental fog, difficulty concentrating, slower decision-making, and sometimes headaches.
One of the reasons we did this work is because we saw this happening to people who were perceived as really high performers. In the study, 14 percent of workers said they had experienced mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.
"We used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer," Khare told Business Insider. "Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending, you just keep stamping those PRs." Khare wrote a lengthy essay titled "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it." In it, he wrote that AI fatigue is "the kind of exhaustion that no amount of tooling or workflow optimization could fix."
I am a professor of public health who studies health behaviors and the gap between intentions and outcomes. I became interested in this self-care paradox recently, after I suffered from a concussion. I was prescribed two months of strictly screen-free cognitive rest-no television, email, Zooming, social media, streaming, or texting. The benefits were almost immediate, and they surprised me. I slept better, had a longer attention span, and had a newfound sense of mental quiet.
