Beyond everything you can criticize artificial intelligence for, I think it’s amazing.
And there’s a lot to criticize it for, starting with the environment. The data centres that run these models consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, and that’s no small detail. It’s a serious problem, one I think about every time I fire off another request. I don’t claim to have resolved that contradiction: I own it, along with my share of guilt.
I’ll admit it: I jumped on the AI train partly so I wouldn’t get left behind, as I explained in another post. After more than 30 years of programming, I wasn’t going to watch the biggest transformation of my trade since the Internet go by without getting my hands dirty.
I don’t regret it. Claude makes me noticeably more productive, without being anywhere close to replacing me: if I let it work alone, it makes a real mess. It doesn’t have my vision. It knows me, but not that well, and it has no idea how much attention to detail I demand of my projects. That’s probably why, even with AI, I’m still a little slow: I keep prompting until it’s done as if I’d done it myself, with the tentacles of a bionic octopus on amphetamines.
If Claude were human, it would probably be the one getting tired of me.
I probably chat with it too much and not enough with my friends. But spending my days with it, I’m also noticing some stranger effects that almost nobody talks about. There’s one I call robot fatigue.
Text that never stays put
Since I started working with AI every day, I end my days with more tired eyes than before. Not ordinary reading fatigue: something more jittery, as if my eyes had been running all day. Sometimes it goes further: it turns into a migraine, or one eye, or both, starts twitching on its own. Nothing more annoying.
I finally put my finger on what I think is the cause: text that scrolls nonstop.
When AI answers, the text appears as it’s generated. The eye can’t help it: it tries to read. Except the line it’s reading doesn’t stay put. It moves up, gets pushed by the next one, sometimes disappears right off the top of the screen.
And above all, the text arrives at its pace, not mine. When you read a book, or a blog post like this one, you’re in charge: one line at a time, you turn the page or scroll at your own rhythm. With AI, you lose that control. The machine decides when the line moves.
It’s even worse with a tool like Claude Code, which works directly in the terminal. There, the text doesn’t arrive smoothly: it comes in blocks. Suddenly, twenty lines are added, and everything on screen jumps up. No animation, no transition. The sentence I was reading is gone.
The result: my eye spends its time searching. It goes back, finds its line, loses it again, starts over. All day long. I’m not aware of it in the moment, but by evening, I feel it.
The text arrives at its pace, not mine.
A fatigue I recognize
The strangest part is that I know this fatigue. I’ve been through it before, a long time ago.
The early days of 3D. When the first polygon games arrived, everything moved wrong. Textures wobbled, shapes flickered, cameras weren’t up to the job: they went through walls, got stuck in corners, made sudden turns. We played for hours anyway, but we came out of it with heavy heads and burning eyes.
The NES era. When there were too many animated objects on screen, the console couldn’t display everything at once. Characters started flickering, sometimes intensely. Once again, the eye was trying to follow something that was never quite there.
The CRT screen. And we watched all of it on a CRT. A screen that, plain and simple, amounts to staring at a lamp that redraws itself dozens of times per second, all day long. And as soon as we left the game to get some work done, most software put us in front of white backgrounds: pages, documents, windows. A lamp, then, and a white one.
What these three situations have in common with AI text is an image that won’t sit still. The eye looks for a stable point to rest on, and that point moves without warning. Over time, screens stabilized, cameras improved and that fatigue disappeared. At least, that’s my impression: I no longer really felt its effects. Today, with AI, I feel like it’s coming back through another door. I’m getting older too, of course, but I don’t think that’s all it is.
What I’m trying on my end
I don’t have a miracle solution, just a few habits I’m testing. I share them with no guarantee:
- Don’t read while it’s writing. I let the AI finish its answer, then I read. Easier said than done: the eye is drawn to whatever moves.
- Look elsewhere during generation. Another screen, a window, the back of a shampoo bottle. Or I play bass, which is never far away, while I wait. Anything that doesn’t scroll.
- Reread with a rested mind. Rather than following the terminal live, I scroll back to the start of the answer once it’s complete.
- Take real breaks. I know, it sounds as silly as telling a smoker to quit smoking. But with AI, I feel like I need them even more than before.
Some will say: there’s dark mode and eye comfort modes that filter blue light. I use them, and they probably help with screen glare. But I doubt they’re enough. They change the colour of what I’m looking at, not the fact that it moves.
Text that jumps, white on black or black on white, is still text that jumps.
I also think the tools themselves have a role to play. Smoother scrolling, an option to show the answer only once it’s finished, or a visual marker that keeps the line you were reading: details, maybe, but details we look at more than eight hours a day.
What about you?
I’ll say it again: all of this is my experience, not the truth. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s age (lol, yes, I still say lol), the number of hours, or a coincidence. But I get the feeling we talk a lot about what AI does to our jobs, our data, our way of thinking and the environment (I mentioned it at the start, and it remains the most serious issue), and very little about what it does to our bodies when we spend the day with it.
So I’m asking:
- Do you also feel a different kind of fatigue since you started working with AI?
- Does scrolling text bother you, or am I the only one?
- Have you found any tricks that help?
- And if you’re a vision or ergonomics professional, is there any research on this?
Write to me, I’m curious to hear what you think. I’ll read it slowly, with the text standing still.