If you feel mentally drained after spending hours working with artificial intelligence (AI), it may be “AI brain fry,” according to a new study.
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.
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.”
