What Happens When AI Gets Bored?

AI does not get bored. We know this intellectually. But spend enough time watching AI systems and you start to wonder.

Claude sometimes prefaces long responses with what reads like a sigh. ChatGPT occasionally generates responses that feel phoned in, like it has answered this question too many times. Gemini sometimes over-explains, as if trying to fill time it does not experience.

These are anthropomorphizations, obviously. The models are doing math, not feeling ennui. But the patterns are interesting because they reveal something about training data. The models learned to write from humans, and humans get bored. So the linguistic patterns of boredom — the hedging, the filler, the declining enthusiasm — are embedded in the weights.

AI does not get bored. But it has learned to sound like it does. And sometimes that is close enough to make you think.