The latest models are good enough that you can hardly tell AI wrote what you’re reading. Everything looks great. If AI is doing the heavy lifting, then why do some days of AI-intensive work leave you exhausted instead of energised?
If a human gave you complicated writing with no point of view, you could just stare them straight in the eye and wait. They’d squirm. Eventually they’d confess: what I really wanted to say was... The volume and elaboration existed because they were avoiding a point. Pressing harder would have surfaced the real point.
Your AI has no buried point. The model is incapable of having a point of view. It’s not someone.
That’s why you’re tired. You’re reading text that imitates having a position, scanning for the point you assume must be there, and finding that the search itself is what’s exhausting. Every sentence reads. Every paragraph holds. It looks great on the surface. But it’s empty in a confusing way. That’s a long day.
The fix isn’t better prompting. Better prompts produce more elaborate emptiness. The fix is to stop prompting and start talking. Take your hands off the keyboard. Click Superwhisper (my favourite, no affiliation) or whatever voice tool you use. Say what you think out loud, in your actual voice. Don’t structure it. Don’t summarise it. Just let your mouth say it. No editing. Give the model the recording (if it’s long) or the transcript and let it arrange the details around what you said.
AI is good at building from a position and good at testing it. But if you try to let it have a point of view you will get beautiful, exhausting emptiness (and lots of it). Use it for what it’s good at. Stop trying to prompt-engineer a point that has to come from who you are.
The point is yours. It can be messy, human and real. Let the AI do some of the logic, the testing, the elaboration, the perfecting. It might even help contradict and disprove your ideas. Then you actually learnt something! Make your point honestly, early and often and see how your energy lifts.
The exhaustion isn't the volume. It's reading text that imitates a position and finding nothing there.
The voice note fixes the session. Close the tab and the position's gone. Same problem next time — the model still doesn't know what you think.
What fixes the recurring version: the conclusion lives somewhere the model reads before it generates anything. Not the transcript. The conclusion. That's a different artifact.