AI Fatigue and the Slow Erosion of My Soul

Image: Brain melt / badly edited by the author

Before we talk about my crushed soul and you shower me with pity, I’ll preface this with why I'm using AI enough for it to be burning me out.

Simply put, I don’t really have a choice.

I’m in an industry (marketing) that’s undergone a shift towards embracing it. Well, that’s a bit of a stretch. What I mean is the suits, execs and the CEOs are embracing it, and the companies who pay for the marketing are loving it too because it means packages are cheaper and outcomes are faster. From what I can see, we’ve already reached the point of no return. The stigma around asking for AI-produced work is no longer there. Everyone else has little option but to get on board. It seems many are; according to Microsoft, 75% of global knowledge workers are using AI in their job now.

That’s where I find myself. Using it, despite not really wanting to use it. And it’s leaving me AI-fatigued.

Look, I get it. I get that numbers have to make sense, and if others are doing it, you join them or risk flatlining. In a business sense, it’s useful enough. For shitty, mundane tasks like taking data and putting it into spreadsheets, or creating formula and templates, it’s now at a level where it’s actually helpful. Can you believe it? A technology that’s had billions of dollars pumped into it, while burning through resources and turning the world into a giant server, can be helpful, sometimes, at certain things.

It can also get ideas from a 0 to a 5 really quickly — again, great for creative industries — and if you learn to write decent prompts, style guides and parameters, it might even give you output that’s a 7 out of 10. This is partly the problem. For many businesses, that’s good enough, so why pay for a more human-crafted piece? AI-produced work is lowering what people will pay for services, fast, and in a way, de-valuing the work itself. If you want to be a bastion for human-created work, that ceiling is being brought down pretty close to your head. For those of us who need to get paid, you know, to live, that path is not always an option anymore.

But, brain-meltingly boring tasks aside, having to use it for work that was once creative, once craft from my skills, my instincts, my judgement, is a little bit soul destroying. A slow creep, day by day, chipping away at my self worth. I see the output afterwards, and it’s just fine. It doesn’t move me. It won’t make waves anywhere. It’s just what it is. I guess that’s the point though, this current iteration of AI helps people get things done fast, not necessarily good. Don’t get me wrong — I, the human, still have an important role to play here, and it’s why I’m still paid. It’s my skills, instincts and judgement that separate any work I produce from the mindless slop that’s polluting the Internet. I’m not typing in a prompt and sending the result to production. It still goes through planning, research, ideation, editorial, review and more to ensure some level of quality.

But I can’t shake the lack of feeling in it. It’s not really mine. The end result is a strange mix of whatever the machine gave me and whatever I could do to improve it.

What is there to be proud of? What sense of achievement is there to gain from this?

The one plus is the speed — though in a way it’s also a negative, because I don’t want to become ones of those optimiser-bros — but it at least gives me more time to work on some AI-free projects, which are quickly becoming my sanity check. I write this newsletter. I make furniture now and then, and have been building a new kitchen from scratch. I’m starting a book writing/coaching project with a good friend. I’m slowly stumbling through writing a book on editing, though as each day passes, I wonder if there’s even a point in that anymore. The AI will do that for you. For now, these are the counterweight to seeing my day job slowly handed over to a machine. If there’s any advice to take from this, it’s that now is the time to find, or double down on, some hobbies, and where possible, keep them disconnected from the Internet. If fulfilment isn’t coming from the work, you have to try to find it elsewhere.

I also worry about the bigger picture, something that’s been weighing heavy on my mind lately as I’m only a few months away from bringing my own child into the world. If AI-produced work is the future, and the work itself is utterly unfulfilling, what sort of work crisis awaits them in the future?

The current generation have already made their feelings known about the lack of purpose and worth in a career, and that’s doing work that isn’t entirely automated. You might not agree with them, but it would be hard to argue with someone telling you getting a job is pointless when the job is literally watching a machine do your work for you. And what of our brains? HBR describes it as brain fry, which they define as “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” The continued passing off of any challenge, any deep thinking, any troubleshooting, will slowly but surely melt our brains.

The future of work is a crisis of identity, of purpose, of belonging, of meaning, of fulfilment.

Anyways, I better head back to my new routine of arguing with an AI model over why it can’t do the most seemingly straight forward tasks, even though it did them fine yesterday, until I check myself, realise I’m arguing with a machine, and sit there equally confused and shamed.

They say, choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Seems I chose the wrong job.