Can AI Get Tired? What Neuroscience Says About Machine "Fatigue"
Comparing real neural fatigue to the much stranger kind of degradation in AI models.
Human fatigue has a clear biological story: neurotransmitters deplete, adenosine builds up, the brain starts trading accuracy for speed. It is a real, measurable, physical process.
AI models do not get tired in that sense. There is no biochemistry to deplete. But long conversations and repeated tasks do produce something that looks like fatigue from the outside: drifting focus, more generic answers, small errors compounding.
The honest answer is that it is not fatigue at all, it is context accumulation and statistical drift, wearing the costume of tiredness because that is the closest human concept we have for “getting worse with sustained use.” Comparing the two side by side says as much about the limits of our language for cognition as it does about either system.