Prompting as Self-Portrait
AI installed a distorted mirror where the blank page used to be.
Written by
Caio Abreu Braga
Humankind is a series where we ask the questions every other AI conversation skips: not what changes in how we work or how we design, but what changes inside ourselves.
Without hesitation, I prompted away a thought that occurred to me. In a few minutes, my thought materialized in a prototype, into something tangible and real. My idea is now outside of me, my thinking is represented in something that is unavoidable. I feel unavoidable.
Every prompt is a confession. Before the model returns a word, the box has read me back: the clarity of my thinking, the range of my references, the questions I didn't think to ask. I think I am describing a task, while in reality I am describing myself, my aspirations, the place I work, the assumptions my team has, the knowledge my organization did or didn't bother to write down.
A prompt reveals the ambitions as well as the limits of whoever wrote it.
Yet, we are not given the opportunity to reflect on what we just confessed to the machine. Even when the tool asks follow-up questions, LLMs are going to end up serving us what we asked, packaged with a layer of certainty and confidence. Their response casts a good light into our thinking, always painting a generous portrait of us, regardless of whatever we just confessed to it. The LLMs are there to serve your needs. Painting our portrait as we imagined it.. In that way, we are more consumers than creators. And the customer is always right.
AI replaced the blank page with the promise of a perfect image a few words away for us to consume. The chat window is the only place I can be completely uncertain and receive something completely confident back. Being vulnerable yet receiving certainty back are things we chase in our jobs, in our relationships, and in our lives. But living inside this distorted reality, we end up alienating ourselves from our world, from work, and from creating something meaningful.
We need the blank page and the silence to go deeper into our thoughts and our understanding of ourselves and of the world. We need the conflict of a conversation with someone that will give us back less of a perfect response in order to create something new. We need the time that it takes to reflect on what was said, feeling the discomfort of something growing inside of us. One day it clicks. We learned something from it that we can now use to re-shape our thinking, thus re-shape ourselves. We need to embrace our thinking process if we want to be something more than just a reflection.