What You're Practising
Prompting instead of thinking
Look at you. Sat there, happily tapping away, getting the magic box to spit out that email, or that slide deck. You think you’re being clever, don’t you? You think you’ve mastered the glorious new era of digital assistance, the era where thinking is just optional, a fun little hobby, like collecting stamps or remembering how to tie your own shoelaces.
You see that little blinking cursor after your prompt? That moment of furious, invisible churning where the silicon decides what sort of lukewarm verbal sludge to serve up? That’s where the rot sets in.
Because every time you “use AI,” a phrase so vague and meaningless it ought to be printed on the side of a municipal dustbin, you are practising something. And I guarantee, it isn’t complex calculus or meaningful human connection.
No, you’re practising the wrong things.
You’re not practising thought. You are practising prompting instead of thinking. It’s the difference between actually solving a dreary Sudoku puzzle and just demanding the answers from a grumpy bloke at the next table. You’re trading deep reflection for shallow recitation.
You’re becoming a master of asking slightly complicated questions, rather than mastering the glorious, messy, frustrating business of finding your own answers. It’s a skill set that is about as useful, long term, as being really, really good at operating a temperamental fax machine.
You’re practising reacting instead of reflecting. The AI throws a suggestion at you, a sort of tepid mental slurry that’s ‘mostly adequate,’ and you just nod and click ‘Accept’. You’ve replaced the internal, messy, vital struggle of generating an original idea, the mental fight that gives your brain some much-needed bloody exercise, with the passive, flabby comfort of accepting suggestions. You’re a passenger in your own skull, merely rubber-stamping the itinerary devised by a glorified chatbot.
And practice, as any half-decent miserable git will tell you, is what shapes you. You don’t get better at running by sitting on the sofa watching videos of other people running. You get better at being mentally flaccid by practising mental flaccidity. We are building a civilisation of exquisitely skilled prompters who are slowly forgetting how to construct a meaningful thought of their own. It’s like discovering we’re all turning into slightly damp sponges, endlessly soaking up whatever bland, synthetic narrative the machine squeezes out.
So, for heaven’s sake, pay attention to what you’re practising. If you keep practising the act of outsourcing your own internal monologue, soon you won’t have one worth listening to. And then, we’re truly buggered.