Doomprompting Is the New Doomscrolling.

The new slot machines of thought — AI’s infinite scroll and the quiet outsourcing of our intention.

Anu

Aug 11, 2025

The blank box of ChatGPT, Claude, or your large language model of choice staring back at you felt like a clean slate. Here was a remarkable new technology that put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and all it asked of us was intention .

We would never doomscroll an LLM — right?

But even the most promising technologies have an evil twin, and the blank box of curiosity is no exception. Where social media trained us to passively consume, the dark side of AI trains us to passively “converse” and “create.”

The actions feel similar but the result emptier. We cycle through versions meant to arrive closer but end up more lost. Our prompts start thoughtful but grow shorter; the replies grow longer and more seductive. Before long, you're not thinking deeply, if at all, but rather half-attentively negotiating with a machine that never runs out of suggestions. Have you considered...? Would you like me to...? Shall I go ahead and...? This slot machine’s lever is just a simple question: Continue?

The modern creator isn't overwhelmed by a blank page; they're overwhelmed by a bottomless one. AI gives you ever more options, then appoints itself your guide. It tells you it’ll save time, then proceeds to steal it while you’re happily distracted.

Doomprompting is the new doomscrolling.

I started thinking about this behavioral pattern last year, but it’s become increasingly clear that we've entered the age of synthetic social media, where you're always conversing with an other but with no human stakes.

Dialogue has social dynamics regardless of intent. We talk about AI companions as friends, lovers, therapists and the limits and dangers of investing too deeply in these new-age relationships — but even productivity-focused interactions (iterating on ideas, debugging code, editing essays) subtly socialize us through manufactured conversation patterns. We give AI the benefit of doubt of humanity.

Where doomscrolling made us passive consumers, doomprompting makes us passive conversationalists and creators. The shift from consumption to participation makes the illusion far more convincing, and the addiction far more sophisticated. New technology begets new human behaviors, without exception.

Blank boxes demanding intention were markers of an accidental golden period where the friction required for real cognitive collaboration existed by default. But this was just latency between a tool's release and its optimization. The market for mindful engagement is dwarfed by the market for frictionless consumption.

This follows the same evolution that transformed Facebook from college directory to behavioral modification empire and smartphones from communication devices to 24/7 consumption engines. Except this time, we jump straight from utility to addiction — personalization is the new network effect.

The dopamine of likes and follows is now the dopamine of felt productivity, social validation, and intellectual partnership. Attention shapes everything downstream from it — what we think, create, and become. We're just learning to guard it from social feeds, and now we’re confronted with AI targeting both our attention and something deeper: our intention to think and feel for ourselves.

II

AI can’t do

the

main

thing

for you.

This dynamic is clear when you actually use these tools for an extended time.

To be clear: AI's breakthroughs represent genuine, at times magical human progress. The concern isn't with AI's capabilities but with how interfaces designed for engagement rather than deeper cognition shape our relationship with thinking itself.

For me, AI for vibe-coding and occasional serious-coding has been phenomenal (despite the typical frustrations with debugging errors, loss of context, lack of continuity, and ultimately lack of finer controls). But the question still arises: how much of what's vibe-coded actually sticks? For writing, I found out pretty early on that AI was most useful upstream and downstream of the main thing.

Upstream is braindumping into a chat and filtering out core ideas from noise, maybe creating an outline for a piece. Downstream is taking a draft and pressure testing it against the machine-as-critic, finding out what’s confusing, boring, weak, etc. The messy middle is where the argument lives, and where AI is weakest.

As Balaji Srinivasan notes, AI works “ middle-to-middle ,” leaving humans with the burden of prompting and verifying. For writing though, I’ve found AI useful only for the early middle and late middle: Humans shape the idea. AI refines it. Humans write the core thesis. AI tests it. Humans add the final touch and ship it.

Ask AI to do the main thing for you and it’ll give you something that at first glance is impressive. But on second glance it’s full of clichés and borrowed ideas. It ingests your voice and spits out something else. It seems 60% good so you start editing it, only to spend your time reconciling its argument instead of your own. AI lacks what matters most: a cohesive self , and actual stakes in the outcome.