John, when was the last time you felt like your brain got fried?

I'd say most mornings when we're trying to get our two children to school,

getting like a full fry, like a pan fry on both sides.

I could see that. I could see that.

Personally, I feel like my brain gets fried constantly.

And to be honest, I am doing it to myself by looking at Twitter.

Sick stuff.

For real, I'm on there all the time.

But there is some new research showing that some people are taking more psychic damage at work.

Thanks to AI.

In an article published in the Harvard Business Review by researchers at Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside, these researchers coined the term AI brain fried to describe, quote, mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity. In other words, doing too much with

AI. There's something kind of comically tragic about the idea that these tools that were meant

to lighten our loads seem to be doing the opposite for some. But beyond the psychic damage,

there's a lot in this brain fright idea that

points to how we work with AI. Like, with all the managing it needs, is AI turning us all

into bosses? And is this really the future of work? To get into all this, I'm joined by John Herman,

tech columnist for New York Magazine. Welcome, John. Thanks for having me.

Ream! John Herman, tech columnist for New York Magazine. Welcome, John. Thanks for having me. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

How would you describe AI BrainFri?

Yeah, I mean, the researchers, they describe this as basically hopping around between different pools and feeling overwhelmed, not by just having to multitask, which is already a problem in a lot of jobs, but by dealing with a whole bunch of output. So if you have a programming

tool that can kind of run in the background and starts adding features to software really

quickly, you have another tool that's constructing a report from you, searching the web, and pulling together a market research document. You have another tool that's constructing a report from you, searching the web and pulling together, you know, a market research document.

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