Recently, there’s been a slough of discussion regarding the future of artificial intelligence, with some predictions going so far as to announce human extinction within the next decade. It’s difficult news to take, especially after being bombarded with AI-related developments for the past two years. If you’re beginning to feel a sense of fatigue, you aren’t alone.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ 2025 book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, makes some compelling arguments about the potential extinction of humanity, particularly through the possibility of a superintelligence consuming or controlling the resources we need to survive.
It’s a scary thought, and perhaps we should zoom in on this discussion to see how the average person is actually holding up.
AI is just too pervasive
We often feel powerless in the face of large-scale changes in modern life. Consider the Industrial Revolution, or even the spread of television. However, unique to these developments, it seems that no amount of dystopian texts like Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World could have prepared us for this reality.
Technology seems to develop on its own, advancing at such a rapid pace that individuals can feel as though they have little choice but to keep up. Where the constant emergence of updates and expectations surrounding artificial intelligence grows, a sense of AI fatigue arises, a pervasive sense of exhaustion and helplessness overcomes many of us.
You could say the apparent solution to counter this must be to constantly adapt. Yet this assumption is worth questioning. Technology may be widespread and difficult to escape, but its presence does not mean that individuals have surrendered control over how they engage with it.
How do we overcome such a force?
Overcoming AI fatigue can therefore begin with recognizing that AI does not have to dictate the pace of our lives. Setting boundaries is genuinely useful, and deliberately stepping away from it can help restore a sense of agency. Rather than viewing technological change as an unstoppable force that demands constant adaptation, we can recognize ourselves as participants who still have a say in how much of it enters our daily lives.
Of course, this is easier said than done. How can we maintain our inner peace, or even a sense of mental autonomy, when this seemingly perpetual force has wormed its way into nearly every facet of our lives?
There are countless entry points into this discussion, from work and education to social media and everyday interaction. It is fair to say that AI has begun to permeate multiple aspects of everyday life, making it increasingly difficult to separate ourselves from its presence.
Understanding what we are up against
Just this week, Corinne Purtill of the Los Angeles Times published an article examining the potential cognitive effects of AI on children. And older generations aren’t handling it much better. We are bombarded with “AI slop” on a daily basis, and it’s safe to say that this is no longer an issue confined to the internet.
If you’ve encountered advertising recently, whether it’s a food truck poster or a local hair salon commercial, chances are you’ve already come across AI-generated marketing. It seems to have established itself almost overnight. Why wouldn’t it? It’s cost-effective and, without a doubt, time-effective.
And that is precisely where we need to push back against this fatigue of robotic slop, by turning AI’s own promises against it. AI has made production incredibly fast and cheap. The human response should be to make the things AI cannot cheaply manufacture feel valuable again. Things like human experience and intentionality. If AI can make something in seconds, perhaps the value of human work lies in the fact that we chose to spend more time on it.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. These cost-effective, often free online tools come with costs of their own, particularly when it comes to originality, the environment, and social interaction. Of course, these concerns apply seemingly most directly to those who actively use AI. But this is also where AI fatigue becomes particularly difficult to escape. You don’t have to be a user of it to experience it.
We are increasingly surrounded by the consequences of a technology we may have never chosen to engage with.
So, what do we actually do about it? If people are exhausted by an internet and public landscape overflowing with things that feel mass produced, the answer probably isn’t to produce even more things for them to scroll past. It’s to make something worth stopping for. Something specific. Something strange. Content that clearly took a human being more than thirty seconds to think about.
Generative AI is everywhere, but so are people!
A local business could put up a photograph taken by its owner. A writer could let their voice remain idiosyncratic rather than breaking it down into something universally palatable. These things may take longer, and even be less efficient. That is precisely the point. We have become desensitized to the sheer amount of content out there. So much so that it has become increasingly harder to stop and appreciate what is made by the hands of a person.
We cannot control everything that gets produced around us, but we can influence what we choose to create, support, share, and pay attention to. If AI’s great promise is that we never have to wait for anything, perhaps one small act of resistance is deciding that some things are worth the wait.
There is also the mental burden of constantly having to think about AI. People are told to use it, regulate it, worry about it, and prepare for the jobs it might replace. Before someone has even interacted with an LLM of any sort, they may already have consumed a dozen opinions about what it supposedly means for their future.
This is why an anti-AI response can be understood partly through the lens of mental wellbeing. It does not necessarily have to mean rejecting every AI tool or pretending technological change can be stopped. It can simply mean wanting room to breathe. People need spaces where they are not expected to optimize themselves or turn every aspect of their lives into an opportunity for automation.
There is something psychologically reassuring about knowing that you can choose to do something slowly, imperfectly or simply because you enjoy doing it.
AYe aye, marx!
In some ways, Marxist ideas about automation feel more relevant than ever. Edgar Hardcastle’s 1965 paper, “Automation in Perspective” offers a useful reminder that technological change does not exist in isolation from the people who create and adopt it.
Writing at a time when automation was generating both utopian promises and catastrophic predictions, Hardcastle criticized the tendency to treat new technology as an unstoppable force while overlooking the social conditions surrounding it.
We are constantly told that AI is inevitable, that it will transform every industry and challenge traditional human creativity, or it will become an unavoidable part of everyday life. Whether these predictions ultimately prove accurate is less important than the sense of helplessness they can produce. When technological change is presented as something that simply happens to us, resistance can begin to feel pointless.
Yet history suggests that the future of technology is not determined by technology alone. The anti-AI revolution, therefore, does not have to mean rejecting every technological development. It can mean refusing to surrender our ability to create and choose. It means recognizing that our relationship with technology is something we participate in shaping.
In conclusion
Most importantly, there is still reason to hope. The response to AI fatigue should be to become more deliberate about what kind of future we want to build through our innovation and individuality. We can use technology without allowing it to determine the limits of our imagination.
We can continue making art, writing, thinking, and creating things that carry the unmistakable marks of human experience.
If AI can reproduce patterns, our greatest strength lies in producing what cannot be reduced to a pattern, that being our particular perspectives and memories that capture unique ways of seeing the world. The greatest weapon in an anti-AI revolution is human individuality and the freedom to think for ourselves.