Mental exhaustion from AI use could become more common as employees build and oversee more AI agents.
If you feel mentally drained after spending hours working with artificial intelligence (AI), it may be “AI brain fry,” according to a new study.
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Harvard University surveyed over 1,400 American full-time workers at large companies to find out how much they use AI in their work and how it affects their cognition.
Roughly 14 percent of respondents reported feeling a “mental fog” after intensive conversations with AI systems. They described symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, slower decision-making, and even headaches.
Their findings were strong enough for researchers to coin the term “AI brain fry,” describing the mental fatigue from heavy AI use.
The problem is becoming more common as companies start asking their employees to build and manage AI agents, which are capable of performing tasks with little human supervision.
“Employees find themselves toggling between more tools,” the studywrote. “Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI.”
The strain could mean more errors, decision fatigue, and could even boost people’s intentions to quit their jobs, the study found.
The research comes after several social media posts from AI users, claiming they feel increased cognitive load and mental fatigue when working with the programs. One AI founder said he “ends each day exhausted, not from the work itself but from the managing of the work.”
What type of AI work is most mentally draining?
The survey examined how people interact with AI to identify which tasks create the most fatigue.
The most taxing work involved oversight: situations where employees would monitor the outputs from an AI system. Workers doing this kind of monitoring reported 12 percent more mental fatigue than those who did not, the university found.
The researchers say oversight work involves information overload, which the university describes as “feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information one must process at work.”
Oversight workers also said that AI increased their workload because it forces them to track “more outcomes for more tools in the same amount of time.”
There also appears to be a tipping point when it comes to the number of tools people can handle. Productivity began to decline when employees used more than three AI tools simultaneously, the study found.
Participants with brain fry reported making 39 percent more major mistakes than their colleagues who did not experience the same kind of fatigue, the survey found.
Professionals in marketing, operations, engineering, finance and information technologies (IT) were the most likely to report having brain fry.
However, the researchers also found that AI could be used to reduce burnout if it replaces routine or repetitive tasks. They said it is an important distinction between the types of stress that AI can alleviate and others that it could worsen.
