Increasingly, using AI to mass-produce work can take a considerable toll on mental health, despite the technology’s promise to ease workloads.
The latest study to explain this stark trend is a survey of nearly 1,500 full-time workers in the U.S. who found that an alarming percentage of employees who constantly use AI in their work to push productivity beyond their normal capabilities are exhausted, as researchers from Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside state in a new report. harvard business review.
Researchers have given this phenomenon the evocative name “AI brainfly.”
“One of the reasons we did this is because we saw this happening to people who were supposed to be very high performers,” said Julie Bedard, a partner at BCG and author of the report. Axios.
In the survey, 14% of workers said they had experienced “mental fatigue resulting from overuse of, interaction with, and/or monitoring of AI tools beyond their cognitive abilities.” This percentage was highest in marketing, software development, human resources, finance, and IT roles.
Many employees described brain fly symptoms in similar terms. They reported a feeling of “buzzing” and a mental “fog”. Other symptoms include headaches and slow decision-making.
AI companies promise that AI will significantly improve productivity. Whether that’s true or not, this technology allows workers to multitask at speeds and workloads far beyond normal limits, and this appears to be part of the problem with cognitive effects.
The study identified information overload and constant task switching as some of the main contributing factors to brainflies. In particular, one of the most taxing aspects of using AI to automate work is monitoring, or the need to constantly monitor AI tools, with some AI agents monitoring multiple AI agents at the same time. According to the report, high-level surveillance is predicted to increase employee mental fatigue by 12%.
“I had one tool that helped me think through technical decisions, and two that spit out drafts and summaries, and I kept going back and forth between them, double-checking every little thing,” one senior engineering manager said in this article. HBR Report. “But instead of moving faster, my brain started to get cluttered. Not physically tired, just… crowded. It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for my attention.”
“My thoughts weren’t broken, they were just buzzing. It’s like mental static,” the senior manager continued. “What ultimately got me out of it was realizing that I was working harder at managing the tools than actually solving the problem.”
The study also found a correlation between self-reported AI Brainfly and employees’ intentions to leave their companies. Among those who reported AI Brainfly, intent to leave increased by nearly 10%.
Brainflies are bad news for an employer’s most important bottom line. Workers who experienced a brain fly experienced a 33% increase in decision fatigue. For multi-billion dollar companies, this can mean millions of dollars lost each year due to poor decision-making or paralysis.
The findings join a growing body of research and anecdotal reports that illustrate the harms of using AI in the workplace. separate report HBR Last month, we discovered that AI actually enhances your workload, rather than reducing it. As the topic grows, more engineers are criticizing the use of AI in the workplace, and many admit that their own use of AI is accelerating toward burnout.
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