Letters | AI is taking an invisible toll on humans working alongside it
Readers discuss the mental health toll of AI adoption, early intervention in youth mental health, and ‘love intelligence’
The piece on “ghost workers” addresses a real gap: the human labour that trains AI systems. But there is another workforce the article does not cover – those who must continuously reinvent themselves to work alongside artificial intelligence, not just train it.
I spent two decades in global technology companies. In 2008, we celebrated colleagues who answered email on vacation. By 2015, we expected it. Now I watch people rehearse how to sound indispensable in meetings where the unspoken question is whether an algorithm could do their job cheaper. The workers who train AI have difficult jobs, but at least the job is stable. Those competing with AI face a moving target that never stops.
In Brazil, this is showing up in the data. In 2025, over 546,000 workers took medical leave for mental health conditions – a record, up 15 per cent from 2024. Anxiety or depression is now the second largest cause of workplace absence.
These are not content moderators. They are managers, analysts and developers whose skills require constant updating. Their struggle is invisible, in a sense, because it is classified as personal failure rather than structural pressure.