The Great AI Fatigue: When Innovation Becomes Irritation
There’s something deeply unsettling about being pestered by technology that’s supposed to make our lives easier. I’ve been following a discussion online about AI fatigue, and it’s struck a nerve that goes well beyond the usual tech complaints. We’re witnessing something unprecedented: a backlash not against technology that doesn’t work, but against technology that won’t leave us alone.
The frustration is palpable across every platform we use daily. Google’s search results now come with AI summaries nobody asked for. Gmail wants to help write emails we’re perfectly capable of composing ourselves. Even Adobe Acrobat, for crying out loud, keeps suggesting AI assistance to summarise three-page PDFs. One person mentioned their knitting patterns being flagged for AI summarisation – if that’s not a sign we’ve lost the plot, I don’t know what is.
What’s particularly maddening is the persistent nature of these features. People are describing Gemini reinstalling itself on Samsung watches, power buttons being reassigned to open AI assistants without permission, and notification settings that reset with every system update. It’s like having a salesperson follow you around your own home, constantly interrupting to offer products you’ve already declined.
The parallels with the dot-com bubble are becoming impossible to ignore. Back then, companies slapped “.com” onto everything, regardless of whether it made sense. Today, we’re seeing the same phenomenon with AI integration. Every company feels compelled to demonstrate they’re “AI-forward,” even when the implementation actively degrades the user experience.
What strikes me most about this moment is how it reflects a fundamental disconnect between Silicon Valley’s vision and actual user needs. The tech industry has convinced itself that everyone desperately wants AI assistance with every mundane task, but the reality suggests otherwise. Most of us just want our tools to work reliably without constant interruption.
The economic pressures driving this are real, though. Companies are facing inflation, market saturation, and investor expectations around AI adoption. They’re betting their futures on productivity gains that may never materialise, while alienating the users who actually pay for their services. It’s a classic case of solving problems that don’t exist while creating new ones that definitely do.
I’m reminded of Microsoft’s Clippy – that animated paperclip assistant everyone loved to hate in the late 90s. At least Clippy had the decency to stay in one application. Today’s AI assistants are embedded everywhere, with no easy way to escape them entirely. We’re being subjected to a thousand tiny Clippys, each one convinced it knows better than we do.
The irony is that when this bubble eventually bursts – and most industry observers seem to agree it will – we’ll likely be left with genuinely useful AI applications. The pattern holds: after the dot-com crash, we got Amazon, Google, and the modern internet. After the current AI frenzy subsides, we’ll probably discover that the most valuable applications were the quiet ones that solved real problems without fanfare.
Until then, we’re stuck in this exhausting phase where every interaction with our devices becomes an opportunity for unwanted AI evangelism. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days when technology knew its place and stayed there until called upon. Right now, I’d happily pay for a subscription service that just turns all this stuff off.