PROMPTS are making you STUPID.

Ok, this is going to be hard to believe. I'm cautious about using AI. There are usecases that I strongly support it (coding help), but with most of "creative" generators I see more issues than solutions.

But I wasn't ready for that!

I ran a little experiment. The results terrified me. I ran another one and it went even worse. When I discussed these results with some friends, they didn't believe me.

The experiment

I shared a detailed Nano Banana prompt on X, and half a million people seen it in a day. I even asked people to steal it without credit.

Yes, I personally encouraged people to steal my prompt.

Why? We'll get to that!

It went viral. Government officials from some countries started sharing. Google Gemini's official account praised it.

This was experiment number one. We'll get to the second one shortly.

But first, here's the part nobody noticed:

It was a trap!

The whole thing was a trap. And nearly everyone fell for it.

People think prompts are a new form of knowledge. I wanted to create AI slop on purpose, but keep it on the boundaries of slop. What it means it was just good enough to feel like it's worth something while being completely worthless.

It had to be close enough to something passable for quality output. That was tricky and actually required me to work on the prompt for a while.

Viral slop

The trick was to convince people of value when there's barely any. The numbers and reshares say that I succeeded.

But what was the point? I'll get to that, but first let's talk about experiment number two.

Comment "Prompt"

I did another experiment. I made another prompt, this time for Instagram. The title also said "Steal this prompt", but this time I included the prompt right in the post description.

However, above it and on one of the slides I wrote:

Comment Prompt if you're stupid.

Nearly 100 people commented PROMPT. I was horrified. But let's unpack that, as it's a couple of different factors at play.

Some people commented ironically. You can see if it they wrote the word a couple of times. Or added an emoji at the end. I get that. It's funny.

However the majority did it with a straight face. Why? Do they consciously admit to be stupid? Of course not!

Nobody just shares prompts in the description.

That's too easy. AIfluencers ask people to "comment PROMPT" so that they can have direct contact to them. Most likely to later sell something.

This works through you innitiating the engagement (commenting), then getting a reward (prompt), and through the rule of reciprocity feeling obligated to "give back".

That's why more people buy something that way, than they would normally.

Like Pavlov's dog AI enthusiasts get trained to salivate on command. You see some shiny new AI image, the word PROMPT and you naturally respond with: PROMPT.

I get that people don't read anymore. For years we said:

People don't read. They scan.

But this time the scanning feels even more out of control.

Content gets scanned for relevance and automatic responses happen. In a way, this self-optimization is similar to what AI does too. But at least AI still reads.

People just wanted that prompt that "looked inside" devices. They commented to get it faster, without wasting time for reading.

Like Pavlov's dog salivating with a light-switch, people type "PROMPT" when they see something AI generated.

Let's talk about prompts

Everywhere you look, people say the "skill of the future" is learning to prompt.

But when you unpack that… what they actually mean is: Writing things for AI to do.

This imagines a future where work is done by literally telling the computer to do stuff. But what if it can tell itself that without you?

Thousands of bookmarks

Why do people "save" prompts for later? I understand seeing a cute prompt for tallest buildings models in your city, copying it, pasting into an AI model and sharing that.

I wrote this prompt because I wanted to see the buildings from my hometown. Not as impressive as New York or Dubai, that's for sure.

Totally get it. It's fun. But why save it for later?

In most cases they feel like they need to make a collection, to be better at prompting. How? Hoarding text files is the same as having books on the shelf that you never open.

We're getting it completely backwards.

Your prompt is my idea

If you can't describe your idea without AI, you don't have one. If you need someone else's bookmarked prompt to make your own things, they're not your own things. And they weren't property of the "original" poster either.

It's simple.

What is prompting?

Prompting isn't new at all.

The real skill, the one that mattered for decades in "computer work", was always being able to clearly articulate an idea.

Whether you're talking to a chatbot or a human, the goal is still the same:

Make them understand exactly what you mean.

It's called communication. Try it sometime.

But instead of promoting the ability to think clearly, we've created this weird culture of saving other people's prompts like Pokémon cards.

Slop vs Non-Slop

AI can produce extreme slop or insanely good output. That difference does not come from copy-pasting someone else's prompt.

It comes from you knowing what you actually want. If you can't describe an idea clearly, in your own words, without someone else writing it for you… then you're already obsolete.

Not because of AI. Because you can't communicate your ideas to anyone, human or machine.

"Stealing prompts" is just fine

Non-intellectual non-property

This will be controversial and annoy a lot of you but I have to say it. Prompts for AI are not intellectual property. I encourage people to steal mine and take credit.

You could argue that a vivid description of a place in a book is an intellectual property.

Why are prompts any different?

If you look at even the most complex prompts, there is absolutely nothing creative about them. They are a spec sheet. They outline what you want, what you don't want, what to definitely avoid. When tested, extra specifications are added.

This is exactly how I made my viral prompt. It's looking at the output and saying "I want this, but I don't want that".

A passage in a book expresses emotion.

A prompt expresses requirements.

Like a how to guide of assembling an IKEA table.

Prompts are simple assembly instructions

And, what's even more important, AI outputs are already infringing. They were trained on someone's actual intellectual property.

Your description of that outcome is at best like a summary of someone else's book.

Deal with it!

Illusion of skill

Prompts are descriptions. It's like a brief from a client to an agency. Pure requirements.

Which once again comes down to being able to say what you want.

Now let me tell you a secret. Most prompt masters write a generic outline of a prompt and ask another AI to write a detailed version of it.

That shifts us from thinking to pure dependency. And at first it makes sense. Why do I have to manually write I want my buildings to be rendered in the "orthographic-style" ?

Why should I, human, learn what orthographic even means? Instead I can just scratch my head and say "Machine make nice!".

Do you know what orthographic means?

And this is where over delegation leads to skill atrophy. First it's stuff that is rather tough for us. Complex, winding descriptions with long, precise sentences.

But once we get a hang of it, we optimize our thinking further. Simpler and simpler things get delegated to AI. Our thinking atrophies.

Yes, we are faster. But we're also way dumber. And as our critical thinking wanes, we are less and less prone to criticism of the output.

Delegation becomes dependency. Dependency becomes atrophy.

The bar gets lowered.

Limbo!

Using AI for ultra-basic tasks is skyrocketing

Mismatch

AI was meant to augment human skill. Not replace the starting point of communication. Ideas and communication are what makes us humans interesting in the first place.

Why bookmark and recycle stuff others made? Why outsource thought?

The more you do it, the more your imagination shrinks.

Degrades.

You stop understanding things you were previously really good at.

And when you stop being the idea generator and the quality check, you're no longer useful.

Businesses will fire people like that. It's inefficient.

Let me be clear!

I added the exclamation mark here on purpose. It's not just a title, it's a cry for help!

You REALLY need to know what you want. And when you do, you need to be able to precisely describe it.

All by yourself.

You can ask AI to help you refine it, sure. But it has to come from you. Otherwise it's not genuine. It's pointless.

It leads to people afraid to experiment and instead just copying others. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I guess. Sincerely stop though! We had enough!

Because if you give away steering of your own creative process, you become a passenger. And while you dance along and sing songs waiting for a computer to drive you, you hit a wall and go flying through the windshield.

Yeah, you forgot to buckle up. Skill issue.

You end up with zero control over the quality of output. Everything becomes just good enough. Like a conveyor belt of slop.

You're in charge of "quality" here…

Compounding stupidity

The more people copy prompts, the more this compounds. The more collectively stupid we become, the easier it gets to get even lower.

People get dependent on AI to think for them. Originality decreases. And this is when AI companies can finally start charging you 100x more money.

And you will pay because AI told you it's a good idea. By that point in time you won't think on your own anyway.

# Most business use of AI was underwhelming A recent study showed that most businesses piloting AI use have reported a drop in efficiency and quality.

We may be in our little tech bubbles of smart people using AI to build awesome things. Extrapolated to the entire population though? Not as rosy!

Creative divide

It's not about people using AI vs people not using AI anymore. It's all about people who THINK themselves. They can use AI, or avoid it — doesn't matter. Creativity has to come from a human, not from a generic furniture assembly instructions 5000 people bookmarked to outsource thinking.

And because humans are lazy, this will widen the quality gap. Most will make repetitive AI slop from recycled prompts. Mindlessly. Without reflection.

Few will stand out as the true creatives. Independent thinkers.

Not drones saving up instructions in their own language to achieve basic stuff.

I build beautiful wellness and longevity apps, yes, also using AI. You can catch me on X or YouTube. No AI was used to write this article. It would be pointless. I write from the heart.