AI fatigue is real (and I’ve got it bad)

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. Not “I need a nap” tired, but “please stop asking me to download yet another AI tool” tired.

Somewhere between the hype cycle and the endless barrage of “game-changing” apps, I developed full-blown AI fatigue. I don’t even want to write this freaking article. That’s how fatigued I am. But also because I know here’s 500 other headlines from today ALONE talking about AI. And is there any point in adding to them? Is anybody even reading them anymore? Yawn.

Remember when AI was supposed to save us? Automate the grunt work, collapse timelines, free up our brains for the big, juicy creative stuff? Instead, it feels like we’ve accidentally signed up to be unpaid QA testers for a thousand different startups. The promise was efficiency. The reality is toggling between 12 browser tabs of “AI-powered assistants”, each one claiming to streamline the thing the last one just complicated. That’s not productivity, that’s a pyramid scheme for my attention span.

Then there’s the trust issues (no, not the ones my ex gave me).

But have you noticed a switch in your psyche? That every interaction online now comes with a tiny flicker of doubt. Was that photo real? Is this email from my boss or his chatbot? Did someone actually write this thought piece? Do I even exist? What's the meaning of all this?

And down the rabbit hole we go. Living in constant suspicion is exhausting, like playing two truths and a lie, but with your entire inbox. It’s giving deep-fried 2016 Instagram filter energy, that same sense of “why does everything look fake and overproduced at once?”

And let’s be honest: the hype didn’t help.

But then again, does it ever? For a hot minute, AI was the Future. Every investor deck, every keynote, every panel discussion became a shrine to artificial intelligence. It was like the gluten-free boom of the mid-2010s: suddenly everything was AI-infused, from enterprise software to cereal box campaigns. But if everyone’s “AI-first” and everything is “powered by AI,” then nothing actually feels that special anymore. The novelty wore off. The hype curve hit its peak, and now we’re all nursing the hangover.

Here’s the twist, though: AI fatigue isn’t just burnout, it’s also breeding a hunger for the human.

I’ve spoken about this before, but it appears to be more relevant than ever. We’re already seeing it in micro-trends, the zines, the messy newsletters, the badly lit TikToks that scream “I swear a person made this”. Just like when every brand on Twitter suddenly decided to copy Wendy’s snark and the charm wore off overnight, the saturation makes us crave the opposite.

Authenticity is suddenly precious, maybe even luxurious. Like vinyl records when music got too digital, human fingerprints are becoming a status symbol in a sea of machine polish. AI isn’t going anywhere, and no I’m not an old-head nor am I anti-tech, but I am an observer in the vast universe of digital culture. And I’m observing some freaking fatigue, okay?

Fatigue forces us to recalibrate. It’s not about using every tool or chasing every shortcut. It’s about remembering that friction, imperfection, and actual human perspective are still what make things worth paying attention to.

Maybe the real future isn’t “more AI”. Maybe it’s less. Maybe the train's left the station and it’s too late to get off anyway.

Who knows, we sure as hell will find out though.

-Sophie Randell, Writer