AI was meant to make our jobs easier, to make them more efficient. However, according to research from Harvard Business Review, workers tasked with overseeing different AI agents as part of their daily workflow said it didn’t simplify the work. Instead, it intensified it. And, the authors note that instead of helping, the use of multiple AIs in the workflow could even lead to mental fatigue, thus directly affecting the brain. This isn’t the first time that we have seen reports about how AI can affect the mind. Previously, a study from MIT showed that critical thinking skills were atrophying thanks to an over reliance on AI. Further, we’ve seen a slew of other studies that have pointed to the same concerns: ChatGPT is making people dumber.
Obviously, the issue we’re seeing in this new research is a bit different, as it is more focused on the fatigue and fogginess that AI is bringing to people’s brains after extended use. However, it’s still an important aspect of AI usage to look at, especially as we continue to see more and more AI products hitting our computers and smartphones — like all the new AI browsers that promise to do our everyday tasks for us — which is why this new study wanted to see just how AI usage affects the brain in a work-based environment.
Too much AI is a bad thing
Based on the results showcased in the HBR research, the use of AI tools isn’t wholly bad, at least not for productivity. In fact, the authors note that when using one, two, or even three AI tools at the same time, workers involved in the study reported an increase in productivity. However, this increase diminished as more tools were added to the pile. Additionally, once the workers moved to using a fourth tool, their productivity actually dropped. So, at that point, the AI stopped being more efficient and became more taxing on the human brain. This was most evident in oversight cases, where the worker had to watch the AI more closely.
These findings aren’t exactly surprising, either, since the entire idea of multitasking has been found to be much less productive than people tend to think. The science behind that doesn’t really change just because the tools we’re using do. But how much does multitasking with AI tools actually affect the brain? To find that out, the researchers asked each of the participants if they had ever experienced mental fatigue directly related to the “excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Roughly 14% of the participants admitted that yes, they had felt some form of what the authors came to call “AI brain fry.”
It is this “cognitive capacity” mentioned by the authors that is especially intriguing. While they predicted that people would likely experience mental fatigue at the start of their investigation, there was another outcome that they didn’t predict. And, that outcome is burning out.
Get ready for AI brain fry
It’s easy to think of burning out simply as someone that has run themselves ragged emotionally and physically. But, it actually goes much deeper than that, with both the HBR authors and the CDC arguing that burnout is tied to not only physical and emotional fatigue, but to mental fatigue as well. More specifically in this case, the mental fatigue appears to be directly tied to having to manage AI tools well beyond the capacity of the human brain. One member of the study even described having to use multiple AI tools as similar to bouncing between a dozen different tabs in their head, with all of them “fighting for attention.”
This constant fight to sort through information is obviously going to become a problem after a while. Eventually it could even lead to the worker experiencing information overload after they have reached a certain point. That factor alone is more than enough to lead to workers burning out, previous studies have shown, and these most recent findings seem to confirm that, at least partially.
However, it is important to note that not every use of AI appears to have had these same effects on the brain. And using AI to actually reduce time spent on repetitive tasks did appear to lead to less burnout potential. Considering how early we still are in the overall expansion of AI, future research like this could dig deeper into the possible problems noted here and hopefully help us understand them more.
