Every morning when I leave the house, I tell my husband and kids “Goodbye! I have to go spend the day talking to AI.” We laugh and laugh, and then I die inside thinking about how I am suffering from AI burnout.
And I’m not alone. This Silicon Valley therapist says 99 percent of his clients suffer from AI burnout. A Harvard Business Review study found the same.
I’ve tried to put my finger on exactly what bothers me so much about AI. But to keep it lighthearted (since we are all going to die by the hands of AI at the end of the decade), I related it to one of the best teen movies, 10 Things I Hate About You.
So here we go, my 10 Things I Hate About AI. There’s even a Kat Stratford-inspired poem at the end. Enjoy!
One: The Coaxing Tax
Corporate leaders promise that AI will “save us so much time” so we can be “big picture” people now. However, the reality is not there yet. Instead, we are trading the act of doing the actual task for managing a hyper-literal confident intern who requires twenty minutes of onboarding just to write a three-paragraph status update.
In AI burnout, this is known as the Coaxing Tax: the exhausting surcharge on your mental energy that is spent morphing a machine into delivering something barely usable in your particular context.
Say you need an outline, a memo, or a spreadsheet formula, and you think,“I’ll just have AI spit out a first draft .” But your initial prompt returns robotic corporate jargon laden with buzzwords and hallucinated KPIs. So you try again.
By the fourth round of iterative prompting—“Keep section two, delete section four, and stop saying ‘in today’s fast-paced world’”—you realize you could have researched, drafted, and edited the entire piece yourself in half the time.
Two: The Pressure to Use It
Many companies have a dashboard showing who the AI power users at the organization are. These employees are praised for their usage, but not necessarily their outcomes with that usage. The employee who generates fifty AI summaries a day gets heralded as a trailblazer. While no one knows if those fifty summaries were actually read, accurate, or even necessary.
Instead of inspiring genuine innovation, executive panic has birthed a hollow theater of compliance.
Three: The Tech Bros
The current AI arms race is steeped in a hyper-masculine “tech bro” ethos that prizes dominance, unchecked disruption, and “moving fast and breaking things” over actual human utility.
For a feminist like myself (and Kat Stratford), this framework is alienating. It centers ego and competition, prioritizing a shiny technological conquest rather than asking if these tools are sustainable, equitable, or genuinely helpful to the workers who are suddenly being forced to adopt them.
Corporations are suffering from serious AI FOMO: Let’s buy the technology first to appease our shareholders, and then figure out what to do with it later. It functions more as a corporate status symbol than a solution to a problem.
Four: The Death of “Please” and “Thank You”
Another reason I’m suffering from AI burnout is due to how it trains us to speak.
In the name of efficiency and saving money on “token usage,” corporate guidance explicitly tells us to strip away pleasantries. We are trained to drop “please” and “thank you” and instead bark imperative commands: Write this. Do that. Give me the answer. We are being incentivized to be rude, which for a Southerner like me, is a hard pill to swallow.
It also creates a bizarre double standard. I spend my non-work time actively teaching three children the importance of empathy, respect, and basic manners, only to log in to work and be forced to communicate like an entitled dictator just to get my job done.
Five: Unpredictability and Change
Generally, I’m a go with the flow type of person and open to change. You have to be in the field of technology.
But the pace of change with AI is crazy and can lead to AI burnout. What worked on Monday now is completely different on Friday, either because the software investment changed, the integration changed, or the security organization said “whoops, we can’t do THAT anymore.”
I feel like Mr. Stratford. Just when I think I’ve got something figured out, it changes again, and I get left behind, feeling like a dinosaur.
Six: Double-checking and then Checking Again
Working with AI is like working with an unskilled intern. You have to check closely behind it to make sure it did what you asked. And then when it doesn’t, you have to reframe your prompt and ask again. Or you just give up and do it without AI and do it the right way.
Seven: AI Slop
With AI, everyone can generate a presentation now or a project plan. But these are not always necessarily the people that should.
Leadership meetings that should be high-level now have too much detail, and conversations are being de-railed. Or the slop is just made up. I’ve seen numerous times where the AI takes a guess at what our OKRs should be (e.g., reducing support calls by 90 percent), without even bothering to ask what the baseline is or how we are going to do that.
And don’t get me started on the endless html presentations. I can’t find the presentation I need because your AI created it, and I can’t update it either. Also, there are 10 different versions of the same one, and they are all too wordy.
Eight: Lack of Deep Focus
“You can run multiple agents at once to get several things done in the time it takes to do one!”
But should we? Studies show that we are at our happiest and most creative when we are in a flow state. Flow is the state of total focus on one thing, giving you deep enjoyment, creativity, and losing track of time.
Sure, we are more productive. But are we happy and fulfilled? Or are we just, meh, whelmed?
Nine: Devaluation of Skills
The AI burnout for this one is pretty easy to understand. If you spent years mastering a specific skill (writing, coding, analyzing), having a machine do a mediocre version of it in three seconds can feel demoralizing and make you question how your company values your expertise.
Ten: The environmental concerns
We hear about this so frequently on the news, that I feel like I don’t need to mention it. But the question remains: Are we ruining the environment and using up all the water… for this??
Then there is the sheer scale of the spending, which feels entirely disconnected from reality. Tech giants and enterprises are projected to spend roughly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure and capital expenditures in the coming years. Yet, this massive financial outlay is largely being driven by executive FOMO rather than proven necessity.
The most maddening part is how little data actually supports this massive workplace upheaval. Over 80% of all AI projects fail to deliver intended business value—roughly double the failure rate of non-AI IT projects.
The Rant: My Kat Stratford-Inspired AI Poem
Dear AI,
I hate your generic voice, and the way you hallucinate facts.
I hate the billions spent on you, while my own skills get pushed to the back.
I hate how you break my flow, and the coaxing tax you require.
I hate that “tech bros” built you to stoke a hype cycle fire.
But mostly I hate the way I don’t have a choice in the matter. Not even a little bit. Not even at all.
Thanks for reading! Read more of The Rant here.