Developer Reports Growing 'AI-Blindness' to AI-Generated Content
Original: I'm becoming AI-blind
Why This Matters
Highlights emerging cognitive cost of AI content saturation in professional workflows.
Software developer Rafal Cymerys describes a cognitive phenomenon he calls 'AI-blindness': his brain automatically filters out and ignores AI-generated documents at work, causing him to miss key information and rely on back-and-forth clarification instead.
In a personal essay published in August 2026, open source and AI developer Rafal Cymerys describes a pattern he has been noticing at work: when reading documents that appear to be AI-generated, his brain refuses to engage with the content. Despite reading the text, he retains little of it and ends up asking the sender questions already answered in the document.
Cymerys identifies the common thread as documents bearing clear signs of AI authorship — a design doc that mirrors Claude's phrasing, a 20-page marketing deck mixing reasonable strategy with technical gibberish, and a verbose requirements document that reads like unedited LLM internal reasoning.
He argues that, contrary to popular research, humans can detect low-effort AI-generated text through patterns like inflated language, every minor detail pitched as a breakthrough, and hollow filler phrases. He compares the effect to 'banner blindness' — the brain learns to filter signals that carry low information value.
Cymerys concludes with a real-world anecdote: on a Baltic coast vacation, he nearly walked past a restaurant sign featuring a photo of moldy quiche — a moment he attributes to the same trained-reflex of ignoring visually suspect AI-generated imagery.