Maybe I should head to Instacare and tell the doctor I suspect a case of AI fatigue. I can picture him nodding, opening his laptop, typing “AI fatigue” into ChatGPT, and reading me the symptoms generated by the very thing I’m apparently exhausted by.
I love a good morning ritual. Coffee, sunrise, the smell of the ocean, a blank screen, and words waiting to bubble up and spill onto the page, filling the world with good thoughts, advice, and brand yahoo. Who doesn’t love a little brand yahoo.
The ritual is daily, and sometimes it yields a word flow that I just try to hang on to and ride until the end. Other days, it’s like pulling teeth from a drunken donkey. Nothing moves. Anyone who works in a creative field understands that we don’t dole out creativity like salt cod from a barrel. We sit with the blank page. We agonize over the empty space. Getting it out there and making it relevant to a wide audience isn’t always a walk in the park. And if it is a walk in the park, it’s the kind where you’re not entirely sure what’s hiding behind the trees.
That’s part of the gig. I’ve written about creativity and roadblocks before. I know the tricks. I understand the rhythm. It’s frustrating to be stuck, but it’s familiar. It’s manageable.
This morning started like any other. I rose, started a pot of coffee, and wandered around the apartment while it brewed. I watered my plants and checked the height of my potatoes. Yes, I am growing potatoes in a large pot, and they are aggressively tall. I looked across the water and waved at Canada. I poured my coffee, sat at my desk, and opened a blank page.
I had a plan. I was going to write about Sunday’s game and Bad Bunny’s halftime show, about what it means for people to feel seen. I’d tie it into branding, because that’s what I do, land it somewhere thoughtful, and then head down to the shoreline to look for seals while pretending I wasn’t due in a meeting. It was a perfectly reasonable Wednesday.
Instead, I opened my browser and found myself staring at headline after headline about AI fatigue. Apparently, AI became prominent, what, three or four years ago, and we’re already fatigued? That stopped me. I’m over here trying to understand it, trying to work with it, trying to figure out how a writer survives in a world where a machine can generate a passable paragraph in half a second. I’ve accepted that technology moves forward. I’m not nostalgic for quills and ink wells. Although pumpkin pants, I do wish they would make a comeback, but that's a story for another day. I’m learning the thing. And now we’re tired of it?
Maybe I have it. Maybe I should head to Instacare and tell the doctor I suspect a case of AI fatigue. I can picture him nodding, opening his laptop, typing “AI fatigue” into ChatGPT, and reading me the symptoms generated by the very thing I’m apparently exhausted by. It’s absurd. It’s also not entirely impossible, which is what makes it funny.
And then maybe not funny.
Because I don’t think people are tired of a tool. I think they’re tired of not knowing what the tool will do next. We’re already living in a moment that feels unsteady. Headlines don’t land, they detonate. Trust feels thinner than it used to. And then along comes a technology that can fabricate voices, images, essays, and entire identities. It may be a remarkable technical leap. It may be inevitable. But it adds another layer of uncertainty to a culture that’s already stretched thin.
Maybe AI fatigue isn’t fatigue at all. Maybe it’s what happens when the ground keeps shifting, and we haven’t found our footing yet.
What People Mean When They Say “AI Fatigue”
So what is AI fatigue, exactly?
From what I can tell, it’s not a formal diagnosis, though I’m sure someone somewhere is working on a chart. It’s more of a collective sigh. It’s the feeling you get when every app you open suddenly has a sparkling new AI assistant baked into it, whether you asked for one or not. It’s the announcement emails. The panel discussions. The LinkedIn posts written by someone who just discovered the word “prompt.” It’s the sense that you can’t buy a toothbrush without it being described as “AI-powered.”
At first, it was electric. Then it was impressive. Then it was everywhere. And now, for some people, it’s just… a lot.
AI fatigue seems to show up as eye-rolling at headlines. As a reflexive suspicion of the next big update. As teachers quietly bracing for another round of cheating debates. As designers, we wonder whether our tools are collaborators or competitors. As writers, like me, doing the math in the background about how much of what we do can be approximated by a machine.
It’s not that people think AI is useless. In many cases, they know it isn’t. It’s that the pace feels relentless. Every week, there’s a new model, a new capability, a new think piece declaring the future officially arrived. When everything is positioned as revolutionary, the nervous system doesn’t know where to settle.
Maybe that’s the fatigue. Not boredom. Not rejection. Just the exhaustion that comes from being told, over and over, that everything is about to change.
How It Shows Up
Fatigue rarely arrives with a headline. It creeps in.
You hear it in the tone people use when AI comes up in conversation. There’s curiosity, sure, but it’s edged with something else. Skepticism. Weariness. A sense that this might turn into a pitch at any moment. Announcements that once felt impressive now feel relentless. Every new update promises transformation, and after a while, even transformation starts to sound repetitive.
In classrooms, assignments get redesigned again because the last version was easily outsourced to a chatbot. In offices, people skim industry news with a calculator running in the back of their minds. Designers experiment with new features while quietly wondering whether they’re collaborating with a tool or training their replacement. Writers do the math too.
Some people respond by leaning in hard, automating everything they can, trying to get ahead of the curve. Others pull back entirely, deciding they’ll deal with it later. Most land somewhere in between, carrying a low-level question that hums beneath the day: What does this mean for me?
That hum is subtle, but it’s constant. And constant ambiguity wears people down.
What’s Underneath It
If AI fatigue were only about product updates and breathless launch videos, it wouldn’t feel this loaded. We’ve absorbed new software before. We’ve adjusted to platforms, operating systems, and devices that promised to change everything and then quietly became normal. That cycle is familiar.
What feels different this time is that AI doesn’t just sit on our desks. It presses on identity, authorship, trust, and work all at once.
Deep fakes make it harder to trust what we’re seeing and hearing. A photo isn’t automatically evidence. A voice recording isn’t automatically proof. That may sound abstract until you realize how much of modern life depends on shared agreement about what’s real. When that agreement feels shakier, even slightly, something in the background of the mind stays switched on.
In schools, the questions are immediate. If a student turns in an essay that reads polished, structured, and suspiciously fluent, what exactly are we assessing? Effort? Understanding? Prompt engineering? Teachers aren’t just grading papers anymore; they’re navigating a philosophical shift in what learning looks like when information and articulation can be outsourced. That’s not a small adjustment. That’s a redefinition.
At work, the shift is even more personal. It’s one thing to read about automation in the abstract. It’s another to notice that a tool can draft reports, generate images, summarize meetings, respond to emails, and even mimic tone. Some people feel empowered by that. Others feel quietly evaluated by it. If a machine can approximate part of what you do, the mind can’t help but ask how much of you is essential and how much is optional.
And layered over all of that is the speed. New models, new capabilities, new debates about regulation, ethics, guardrails, copyright, bias. The conversation doesn’t pause long enough for anyone to metabolize it before the next development lands. Even enthusiasm can become tiring when it never settles.
None of this means AI is inherently destructive. It does mean it arrived in a culture already stretched by volatility, misinformation, economic anxiety, and rapid technological churn. Add a tool that can generate convincing text, images, and voices to that mix, and it’s not surprising that people feel unsettled.
When reality feels editable, when education feels renegotiated, when work feels partially transferable to code, the word “fatigue” might actually be shorthand for something else. Not boredom. Not rejection. Just the strain of trying to orient yourself while the map keeps redrawing itself.
That strain accumulates. And accumulated strain often presents as tiredness.
Why Uncertainty Feels So Heavy
There’s a reason all of this feels tiring, and it has less to do with technology than with biology.
Human beings are remarkably adaptable. We can handle change. We can handle hard work. We can even handle fear in short bursts. What wears us down is sustained ambiguity. When the brain can’t predict what’s coming next, it stays alert. It scans for threats. It tries to prepare for multiple outcomes at once. That state is useful in an emergency. It’s exhausting when it becomes ambient.
Living in constant uncertainty is a bit like having Bolero as the soundtrack to your life. It builds and builds, layer by layer, tension rising almost imperceptibly at first. There’s motion, even beauty in the construction, but no real release until the very end. If that steady escalation becomes your background music, you don’t necessarily panic. You just don’t fully relax either.
AI didn’t just introduce new tools. It introduced open questions. What is original work now? What counts as cheating? What roles shrink? What roles expand? What happens to truth when fabrication is frictionless? None of those questions have settled answers yet, and the absence of settled answers keeps the mind working overtime.
Over time, even curiosity starts to feel like a strain.
History gives this some perspective. Every major technological shift has carried a similar undercurrent. The printing press threatened gatekeepers. Industrial machinery threatened skilled labor. The internet threatened attention spans and entire industries. In the moment, each leap felt destabilizing. Jobs changed. Norms shifted. Arguments flared. Eventually, new structures formed around the disruption.
We tend to remember the stability that followed and forget the turbulence that preceded it. Living inside the turbulence is always louder than reading about it decades later.
None of that guarantees a painless transition. It does suggest that feeling unsettled during one isn’t a personal failing. It’s a normal human response to standing at an inflection point.
Finding Our Footing
If AI fatigue is really the strain of sustained uncertainty, then the antidote isn’t denial, and it isn’t blind enthusiasm. It’s time.
Most technological shifts feel chaotic as they unfold. The rules aren’t clear. The edges aren’t defined. Everyone argues about what it means. Then, slowly, structures form. Norms emerge. Guardrails get built. What felt destabilizing begins to feel ordinary.
We are very good at integrating tools once we stop trying to predict their entire impact in one sitting.
That doesn’t mean the concerns disappear. Deep fakes will need regulation. Education will need new frameworks. Work will continue to evolve. But evolution doesn’t automatically equal erasure. It often means redistribution. New skills gain value. Old ones shift. Some roles fade. Others appear that didn’t exist before.
The cultural conversation is loud right now because we’re still in the escalation phase. Everything feels immediate. Everything feels consequential. But history suggests that societies metabolize even disruptive technologies over time. They become less spectacle and more infrastructure.
And maybe that’s part of what calm looks like. Not pretending that nothing is changing. Not insisting that everything will be fine. Just recognizing that we are in the middle of something, not at its conclusion.
I’m still sitting down in the morning with coffee and a blank screen. The ritual hasn’t disappeared. The potatoes are still growing at an unreasonable rate. Words still resist me some days and flow on others. AI exists in that space now, too. Sometimes it’s useful. Sometimes it’s noisy. Sometimes it’s both. But the chair is still here.
And so am I.
The Takeaway
Maybe AI fatigue isn’t a verdict on the technology. Maybe it’s a signal about us.
We are living through rapid change layered on top of existing uncertainty. It makes sense that people feel tired when the conversation never seems to pause, and the implications never feel fully settled. Fatigue, in that light, isn’t weakness. It’s a nervous system asking for steadiness.
We don’t have to decide the entire future of work, truth, education, and creativity this quarter. We don’t have to swing between worship and rejection. We can learn the tools without surrendering to them. We can question them without fearing them. We can move at a human pace, even if the headlines don’t.
For organizations, that steadiness matters even more. Reacting to every wave of hype rarely builds anything durable. Thoughtful integration does. Asking what problem you are actually solving, what you want to protect, and where technology genuinely adds value is far more powerful than chasing momentum.
At ThoughtLab, that’s the work we do. We help brands navigate change without losing clarity about who they are or why they exist. AI is part of the landscape now. It doesn’t have to be the entire story.
If your team is wrestling with what AI means for your brand, your strategy, or your people, let’s have that conversation. Not from panic. Not from hype. From perspective.
And tomorrow morning, I’ll still sit down with coffee and a blank screen. The ocean will still be there. The potatoes will probably be taller. The tools may change, but the work of thinking carefully about what matters doesn’t.
