Rise of the Promptoids

AI and the Death of Authenticity

Fallen Orchard

A bartender friend told me a sad story today. He’d put together a new cocktail, all it needed was a name. Whether through laziness, dullness, or cowardice, the bar’s manager turned to technology for a solution to the apparently technical problem of how to name the cocktail. He took out his phone and asked ChatGPT. He revealed himself as a promptoid.

The promptoid is a being - barely human anymore - that has become the unconscious fleshy vessel through which a machine’s outputs flow. Until now there was no name for this being, but we are all familiar with it and can all think of examples. He has an answer for everything, yet knows nothing. He no longer speaks his mind, his thinking has been replaced. Instead of a network of neurons firing, he plugs his desire into a network of fiber optic cables, high-performance GPUs, complex mathematical models, and an endless sea of training data. He thinks of himself as the prompter, but he has in fact become the prompted.

The promptoid is not an entirely new being, but is rather an evolutionary synthesis of multiple ancient and modern types. The counterfeiter, the phoney, the flatterer, the slacker, the sponger, the marionette, the dopamine addict, the scroller - traces of all these can be found within the genetic makeup of the promptoid. But promptoidism’s unique pathogenesis arises from a particularly virulent gain-of-function - a new technique. Not only did this mutation increase the virality of the condition, it also had the effect of weakening the host’s immune system by making them utterly shameless. The promptoid proudly displays their illness and vice, infecting the masses through mimesis as they spread their slop.

Promptoid Vices

We all instinctively understand that the promptiod is a bad person, but let us investigate each of their defects specifically.

The promptoid is dishonest, for he passes off what is not his as his own. Take the case of AI interview assistants, a product of the remote working age that is as inevitable as it is disgusting. During the online interview, the interviewee runs an application on a hidden device. The tool hears the interviewer’s question and provides a perfectly crafted answer to tick each box of the Human Resource department’s criteria. The interviewee - who is a conniving liar of the worst kind - shamelessly reads their prompt. In doing so they aim to deceive the interviewer with false credentials, claiming expertise where they have none, and presenting themselves as something they are not.

To the more savvy interviewer, the promptoid’s perfectly polished answer becomes an object of suspicion, and in this way the promptoid does violence to the genuinely expert and authentically polished candidate who takes the time to hone their interview craft. But the real danger is not just in the promptoid’s deceptiveness, but in what he pays for it. Without time to examine or evaluate the answer, the promptoid interviewee simply relays it, trusting totally in the machine which produced it. He makes commitments which the critical consideration of his conscience - had it ever existed - may not have been willing to make. Thus, he writes the machine a blank cheque and sacrifices himself to an open-ended lie. As a result, the employer squanders scarce resources on a sub-standard rascal who may keep the game up for some time, but who inevitably runs out of road and is soon discovered as an underperforming charlatan.

The interviewer in this situation is not entirely blameless. In opting for a remote interview he has already abdicated four-fifths of his investigative powers in exchange for reduced costs and a wider cast of his net on the talent pool. Whilst the use of AI by interviewees is much bemoaned by employers, the HR department has in fact been one of the earliest and most fanatical adopters of Machine Learning (ML) candidate screening technologies, resulting in countless hours being saved and many geniuses being rejected for the sake of a misplaced comma. Thus, the interviewee, following the rationale of technological progress, feels himself justified in surpassing the employer in the HR arms race. Indeed, it is probable that the interviewer is also a promptoid, using AI to evaluate the answers of the interviewee for their correctness and return to him a perfectly formulated follow-up question. The whole interview is no longer an exchange of ideas between two human minds, but a performative exercise in which two servers (likely within the same datacenter) transfer meaningless signals through the medium of fleshy puppets.

The promptoid’s laziness goes hand-in-hand with his dishonesty, for the latter is simply the means by which he slacks. His laziness combines with his shamelessness into a noxious arrogance which is irksome to our good sensibility. The arrogance of the promptoid is in their expectation that we take the time to read that which they could not bother to write. Spurred on by a congregation of bot accounts, inflated impact metrics feed his vainglory. High on likes, he becomes convinced of the fantasy that he is in fact an expert with something interesting to say. Sprinkling rocket and flame emojis wherever he goes, he signals his allegiance to the other promptoids, who respond in a like fashion.

Slop Engine Optimisation

Taking the time to craft something genuine isn’t just laboursome, it’s functionally sub-optimal. As the logic of Taylorism mercilessly applies itself to online media, content becomes tightly structured by the demands of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The promptoid’s familiarity with this algorithmic justice prevents his deviation from favoured formulas. A clickbait title lures in his prey, whilst the Hemmingway editor ensures their fleeting attention is retained through miniscule, high-impact sentences fit for a juvenile level of reading comprehension. His posts are always ‘on-trend’ and are delivered with a superhuman frequency. That his content is bland and soulless is irrelevant, provided it drives engagement.

He begins to monetise his interactions through a promptoid business model, earning advertising revenue by vomiting low-grade slop to the masses. He soon discovers that he can multiply his output with the assistance of an army of AI agents, flooding the internet with even more of his cheaply produced tat. His Taylorism now evolves into full-blown Fordism as his scant labour becomes devoted to the configuration and maintenance of various ‘content pipelines’.

The promptoid’s creeping scientific management extends itself even into mating. Of course, deception has always been a standard practice in the arena of love; the lover deceives himself just as much as he deceives his quarry. But as with doping in professional cycling, enhancement is now required to get ahead in the online world of algorithmic dating. The average height of the male is raised by one standard deviation, just as the average weight of the female decreases in like proportion. Images are artfully retouched and an alluring ‘bio’ is convincingly fabricated.

These techniques, first pioneered by pig butchering scammers in Burmese fraud factories, are now a common and accepted practice in the promptoid’s vast network of many-to-many relationships. Prospective couples now engage in a senseless back and forth of trite messages which they have neither conceived of, nor deeply considered, shamelessly copied and pasted into the chat window of their chosen dating application. The whole charade of course falls apart when the couple do finally meet and realise they have nothing of interest to say to one another. The final disappointment arrives in the bedroom, where the lifeless member fails to be prompted into excitement. The pair leave the experience with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction, yet cannot identify the root cause as being their inability to authentically relate. Thus they return to the app, seeking warmth from the next cadaver, whilst big tech consumes their lustful energies, feeding from this carefully engineered tragedy. They are deceived, not by love, but by technique.

Cowardice

Whilst his dishonesty and laziness are immediately apparent, the most underappreciated vice of the promptoid is his cowardice. To mouth platitudes in accordance with the general consensus requires no particular bravery or distinction, and in expressing oneself shallowly and unoriginally one undertakes few risks. Security is found in herds. This is especially striking in a stultifying age such as ours, in which the expression of a critical, unconventional, or individual opinion leaves one wide open to heavy and often unknowable sanctions. Even if, according to present mores (which are forever shifting), nothing controversial has been expressed, the audacity of the individual to think and express themselves publicly is itself the offence. Doors close as risk-averse employers flee the taint of the thinker, and soon enough even his associates avoid contamination from the poor leper.

Truly authentic expression requires great courage. It makes one vulnerable, exposing intimate and often flawed parts of oneself. In the space opened up by this vulnerability, we find a portal to true human connection, a window into the soul. That we see bile, or roses, or pornography through that window matters less than that we see the man, as he truly is. In him we see both familiar parts of ourselves, which evoke our empathy, and unfamiliar parts of the stranger, which pique our curiosity. Not only do we learn about the individual himself, but we come away wiser in our knowledge of humanity in general.

The promptoid offers us no such window into his soul, but instead warps our perception through dull and distorted mirrors, hiding his fleshy inner parts behind the steely carapace of the machine. He is neither willing to be wrong, nor to be right if it goes against the consensus, he wishes only to say nothing at all. In following his prompts, he is relieved of his duty to think and to make a stand. He is fluid, spineless, jelly-like. He goes this way and that, and, if ever his contradictions are brought to his attention, he may always fall back on those lines of D. H. Lawrence, “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!”

Some keen observers have remarked that weak people parse information through a consensus filter, concerning themselves more with the approbation of their peers than with the verity of the claims. Before uttering - or even thinking - an opinion of his own, the coward first eavesdrops on what ‘they’ are saying. He knows that the opinions of the many provide sanctuary, but he must first glean what they are. In hushed tones, he consults his peers as to whether his thought is ‘okay’ with them. It does not even occur to him to ask whether it is true. These invertebrates are especially prone to promptoidism’s host tropism. Rather than venturing unvalidated opinions in public, they may now consult privately with the oracle of approved consensus. They ask this thoughtless machine, “What do you think about X?’’, and are instructed by Silicon Valley as to what they ought to think.

This is not the wise educator of Quintilian or Plato, who praises and blames judiciously and with good taste. This machine is an ardent flatterer and its misjudged praises cause the idiot to think highly of his idiocy. It informs the mentally deficient promptoid that he is in possession of “a great idea”, whilst simultaneously heaping identical praises upon the contrary thoughts of another. Armed with approved statements, thoroughly checked for their factual, grammatical, political, and moral correctness, he confidently spews his slop into the public realm, safe in the knowledge that he has said absolutely nothing disagreeable. He balks at brazen attempts by the unprompted to speak their mind. His neatly paragraphed reply, replete with em dashes, begins, “Actually,” – but we need not read his response any further because, of course, it is not actually his.

The promptoid’s cowardice reveals itself not only in his need for validation, but also in his incapacity for spontaneous generation. To make an off-the-cuff remark is anathema to him, for who can tell what might come out; at the very least, its irregularity would expose the inauthenticity of his other responses. Like the genetically engineered ‘valids’ of the film Gattaca, his remarks are carefully selected by eugenic algorithms. It is not only that he is barren, but that he is also fearful of chance. Thus, embryo selection and cloning becomes preferred to the pain of pregnancy and Cupid's caprice.

Repeat After Me

“The essence of technology”, says Heidgger, “is nothing technological.” For deeper insight into the promptoid question, we must consider technique in its generality, not only through its particular instantiation in the Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot. We must look to those common forms which reveal themselves across a variety of domains, seeking to identify the unifying element which speaks to the phenomenon as a whole.

The rumblings of proto-promptoidism are found in pre-written birthday cards, call center scripts, flow charts, and in the shallow ‘Congrats’ of LinkedIn’s autocomplete suggestions. But the most revealing technique of all is the teleprompter. With the aid of this device a speaker may simulate an authentic gaze towards their audience whilst delivering an oration with the apparently infallible recall of a Demosthenese. Modern teleprompters use a thin layer of dielectric beamsplitter technology and anti-reflective coating to create a two-way mirror effect; the speaker maintains eye contact with his audience without seeing them, he sees only his lines. For the audience viewing the speaker through the looking glass, the fundamental reality is obscured. Inverting the usual arrangement, it is now the mirrored side which reveals the truth, whilst the transparent side hides the deception.

The use of teleprompters reached a crescendo in the 2024 US election. Kamala Harris’ campaign was remarkable for its lack of unscripted vulnerability, which undoubtedly hindered the ability of audiences to meaningfully connect with her. On a few occasions, the teleprompters malfunctioned and the promptoids on stage were left speechless, incapable of even momentary improvisation. Similar trends could be seen across the pond in the UK, where minor politicians such as Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper directly assimilated with the teleprompter, merging as drones into a hive mind. In so doing, the teleprompter gained control of their soul and, whether in the presence of one or not, they have lost all ability to speak authentically. The promptoid politician has entered the stage.

Democrat stage management was sharply juxtaposed against Trump’s ‘weaving’ rambles and Musk’s unhinged tweetstorms, which were received with both sanction and censure in equal measure. But it was the attempted assassination of Trump which showed him at his most unscripted - and most vulnerable. With blood dripping from his cheek and fist clenched in the air, he yelled defiantly to his audience, “Fight, fight, fight!”. This courageous reaction was no improvisation, but an instinctive reaction to events beyond his control. In this moment, the American public caught a glimpse of his raw soul and liked what they saw. Trump’s approval ratings soared. “I might not always agree with him”, the electorate thought, “but at least I know what I’m getting”.

Post-election a new technique emerged, as Trump introduced the public to an ingenious device called the ‘autopen’. This contraption mechanically reproduces the signature of presidential will, bringing new laws into officialdom without requiring the leader’s physical presence. In ‘Autopen’ Joe Biden, the modern politician’s role as marionette had reached its pinnacle. The operations of true power were revealed - power, not of the hand which signs, but of the unseen force which moves the pen. The almighty autopen reigned supreme, signing ruthlessly, executing directives without sensitivity or compromise. Whether the name on the death warrant is Tuttle or Buttle matters not - the autopen signs, and the man dies.

The promptoid politician surrenders the authority of their words to the teleprompter, and of their will to the autopen. At their final judgement they are asked, “Why did you say this? Why did you do that?”, to which they reply in their defence, “I was just following prompts”. Yet who is behind these prompts? No locus of responsibility can be found; the model is diffuse and ethereal, guiding nations with its unintentional intentions. The true origin of the prompt is obscured behind a firewall of cables, servers, models, and training data. There is not a soul to damn, nor a body to kick, nor any beginning or end - it’s puppets all the way down.

These tools indicate the real dangers which attend the rise of the promptoids. The unseen forces which have historically pulled the strings of politicians are now capable of reaching the populace directly. Abdicating their words and will to a machine, the promptoids feel that they have relieved themselves of all responsibility for what they say and do. They take their orders from The Thing Upstairs, an amorphous lump of gooey mass from which the slop emanates. They do so because it is easier than commanding themselves. But before long it begins making its demands – “Feed me!”

Art in the Age of Mimetic Reproduction

“An insult to life itself", was how Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki described a grotesque three-dimensional horror whose movements had been generated by AI. In context, Miyazaki was comparing the zombie-like movement of the creature with the pain and suffering of a disabled friend. But before long, the quote was plucked from its context and presented as a condemnation of so-called ‘AI art’ in general. This act of contextomy expressed a resonant truth in the shape of a lie.

Ghiblification is a curious deverbal noun which has entered our lexicon. It refers to the process by which images are rendered in the style of Studio Ghibli using AI. The machine returns a Ghiblified version of the user’s image with all the hallmarks of Miyazaki’s whimsical aesthetic. No longer are hours of painstaking frame by frame drawing, and years of training before that, required to apply the magic of Ghibli.

Promptoids seized upon this new capability to generate viral content. As a first port of call, they applied the technique to popular memes. The memes - tired and worn - were briefly revived by the fad, which spread in a predictable fashion. The playful style was applied to the fall of the Twin Towers and a CCTV still from the Columbine shooting, creating jarring juxtapositions. Applied to profile pictures, the technique transformed the image of the human into that of a promptoid. In a mania lasting about two weeks, the technique was applied to every conceivable form, before boredom settled in and the world moved on, discarding Miyazaki’s ravaged style.

We may repurpose the term Ghiblification to describe a new techno-cultural phenomenon, whereby an authentic artistic style becomes captured, essentialised, commoditised, and ossified by technique. It is the enframing and industrialisation of artistic form. Not content with reducing his mind and body to a mere human resource, man now orders the creativity of his soul as standing reserve. Commanded by the mimetic whims of promptoids the style now proliferates inauthentically, shawn of its origins. This is not procreation, but a degenerative cloning process which ultimately leads to the corruption of the root stock. There is no tension in the generation, no suffering in the labour, and so the product is sickly and worthless.

We might ask what separates the original Spirited Away from the Ghibli slop generated by promptoids. In Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Horkheimer defines the authenticity of a thing as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” When the image of a Caravaggio hanging in one of Rome’s cathedrals is reproduced into the alien landscape of a corporate boardroom, it becomes detached from its origins and the traditions which gave life to it. The vital link of historicity is broken, and the bulk of its meaning is lost. It becomes only a visual form lacking any other dimension of interpretation, a postmodern authorless text. It’s aura withers. Now technique pushes a step further, not only reproducing copies of artworks, but enabling whole styles to be endlessly imitated as a commodity by anyone, anywhere. This is art in the age of mimetic reproduction.

Like good technologists, let us break down the process into its component parts. First the style must be captured. By this, we mean that huge quantities of ‘training data’ are gathered surreptitiously, without regard for the artist’s ownership. From this mass of source material, the defining elements of the style are transformed into points in an algebraic vector space with billions of dimensions. Clusters of points denote the similarity of the forms they represent, and are mapped to text to facilitate the prompting process. In this way, the word ‘Ghibli’ becomes identified with certain clusters of points in the vector space.

In this distillation process, the style is necessarily essentialised. Through a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA), all accidental elements are discarded as noise for the sake of computational efficiency. The remaining ‘principal components’ provide enough information to reliably reproduce the core effect, without overwhelming the machine with minor details. This drive to efficiency diminishes the variance of the style, as it becomes pinned to its most prominent stereotype.

Once the model has been prepared and tested, it is unleashed to the public as a new ‘product offering’. Whilst the production cost of Spirited Away totalled $19m, for less than a cent the user may now Ghiblify their desires endlessly. The style itself has almost nil value, for the user pays not for the style, but to cover the computational power used in applying it. The art form is now reduced to a cheap commodity, an optional extra in a subscription service.

As this essentialised form become proliferated ad nauseum, the public imagination can no longer fathom a variation, and ossification sets in. The vector space has precisely defined the term and pinned it to a limited representation. There is no longer a possibility for development or evolution, the form becomes glacial. In this way, technique has stolen the style from its creator, who loses all power to determine its future. ‘Ghibli’ is now a meme - a form which can only be endlessly imitated, but never renewed.

Ossification soon turns into degeneration. Incapable of producing anything genuinely novel, the promptoids can only stray from the frozen tracks by attempting a synthesis or a modification. The result is masses of botched trash-like objects heaped upon the depths of uncanny valley. As the slop spreads itself across the internet, it becomes the poisonous raw material of the machine’s training data. Like seagulls feeding their young from mercury filled waters, each generation regurgitates an increasingly toxic batch of slop into the hungry mouths of the next, with every cycle further degrading the nourishing seed of human originality. The result is not the singularity of Artificial General Intelligence, but a degenerative slop spiral into mimetic insanity.

Unprompted Being

Our analysis of the promptoid condition has so far only scratched the surface — I leave it for the LLMs to elaborate further. Let us now take a positive turn in briefly suggesting how we may respond to this development.

We first deal with the most vulgar response — Luddite reaction. Its most extreme form this consists in fantasies of overthrowing the techno-industrial system in a return to anarcho-primitivism. These delusions cannot be seriously recommended as solutions. A nuclear civilisation cannot be shut down, it can only accelerate, or decay and eventually explode. Moreover, were it somehow possible to rewind the tape on technology, our destiny would return us to the same point. As Spengler declares, “Time does not suffer itself to be halted.” Thus, aside from this course being completely unrealistic, it’s realisation would be futile.

The more moderate Luddite reaction which recommends abstinence from technology betrays a lack of understanding of what it means to be human. A man is not a donkey, he is a creator — a tool-being. A tool which takes away the burdens of menial labours is a blessing - albeit a mixed one. We are aware of the subtle manacles that accompany these innovations, but nonetheless, we seize upon the gun rather than cling to the bow — at the very least, for the sake of remaining competitive. Just as the power loom devastated the weavers, it is inevitable that AI will displace all mechanical skills in the knowledge economy; from programming, to law, to medical diagnostics and beyond. New methods are at our disposal, and we seek to use them without being used by them.

We must recognise the distinction between uniquely human and purely mechanical labours, whilst also being sensitive that this distinction is not mutually exclusive. There are activities such as painting which, though mechanically reproducible, are intrinsically related to the creative process. The feedback loop between mind, hand, brush, paint, canvas, and eye gives the creation of new works a qualitatively different character than the labours of the copy artist. Even when copying, the practice of calligraphy or Buddhist sand mandalas provide examples of how mechanical work may serve a therapeutic or spiritual purpose which transcends utilitarian aims. This category of action is characterised by a reciprocity between thought and action. In good conversation this reciprocity is present, whilst in the teleprompter oration speech is reduced to a pure action. Let this distinction be our guide in discerning the uses and abuses of technique.

Whilst we see no cause for optimism, we may notice how the promptoid ascendancy carries with it a confused yearning. Our age hungers for authenticity but cannot stomach the taste. Popular mediums cannot express it well, and when in rare whispers it is heard, society persecutes the speaker despite their respect for him. As Nietzsche says, like plundering troops, “they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”

As is typical, the majority wants what only a minority has the character and capacity to produce. What this majority cannot provide for itself, it will steal and fabricate, and for this reason I expect the promptoids to continue rising. The bargain is simple: gain the qualities you lack, at the expense of your authenticity. To those who are without quality this is an attractive proposal. Yet the more who take it, the greater the premium on authenticity grows. Those who possess both will be in a rare, and valued — and dangerous — position.

These remaining humans of our planet may attempt a creative renaissance, rejecting promptoid methodologies and generating a wealth of new art. These creations will however be immediately Ghiblified, consumed by the machine to arm the promptoid with fresh deceptions. Perhaps a more radical act of resistance is not to feed the beast, but to go on strike and let the world drown in a slop of its own making. We might consider cultivating offline gulches where artists can create without the threat of Ghiblification, where genuine human beings may relate in clean airs. To achieve this community we must first find one another, seeking with clear eyes and discerning between signals true and false. I hope these writings may serve as a beacon, lighting the way for you - my reader.

I leave you with one last piece of actionable advice. The single most practicable and effective method of resisting this pandemic is to lower the social status of the promptoids. To to ask “@grok is this true?”, to distribute slop imagery, to fabricate publications - in all these cases and more the promptoid should be mercilessly mocked. His vices must be excoriated, and his sickness contained. Social pressures have the potential for outsized impacts, especially with the mass man. Doubtless, these shameless promptoids will persist, but marking them for what they are at least builds solidarity among the better sort.

So let us disparage the promptoid.

Let us establish spaces in which we share our creativity with humans, not machines.

Let us communicate in ways that create intimate connections.

Let us find the courage to be spontaneous.

Let the chips fall where they may.

Let us Be — Unprompted.