AI hypervigilance is now an omnipresent cognitive load for your users

Pavel Samsonov argues that AI has made scams and machine-written content so common that users now check everything they read, and that companies have shifted this effort onto them.

AI tools have made scams and machine-written text cheap to produce, so people now check whether each message, review or web page they meet is real. Pavel Samsonov, who writes the product newsletter The Product Picnic, calls this constant checking a load that companies have handed to their users. He contrasts companies that filter AI content out for their users with companies whose business depends on AI content.

• Samsonov describes a constant wariness among people online: any message, profile or article might be machine-written or a scam.
• Some companies do the checking for their users. The library-lending app Libby, for example, builds a filter for AI content into the product.
• Others depend on AI content. His examples are SurveyMonkey, Grammarly and social networks that do not let users filter out AI posts.
• The second half of the essay argues that reading machine-written text wears down people's own writing and thinking.

Every AI feature creates some checking work, and a product team decides whether the product or its users carry it. This framing for product teams is an inference and is not the author's claim.

16 September 2026: when AI helps produce work, a person still checks it before others rely on it.