Mind If I Prompt?

I light up my first prompt of the day before I’ve even had coffee. Don’t you?

It feels clean, frictionless. A little flash of the Gemini star, a quick swirl of the ChatGPT knot, and poof—the answer is there. No messy thinking, no arduous research, no tar staining my mental fingers. This is the new smoking. We’re all doing it, from the C-suite to the high-schooler’s bedroom. It’s sophisticated, it’s productive, it’s the smart thing to do.

Remember when Big Tobacco had doctors telling us that their brand was "less irritating" to the throat? Today’s Big AI tells us their models are "responsible" and "aligned" while they shove that little syringe-shaped icon into every digital surface you touch. The free sample has been slipped into your Gmail, your Word doc, your code editor, your Photoshop. The dealer isn’t on the corner anymore; he’s a UI designer at Google.

The Second-Hand Smoke

I’m not even sure what the health consequences are yet. It’s not lung cancer this time. It’s brain atrophy. The inability to hold a thought, to write a paragraph from scratch, to connect two original ideas without a digital middleman.

And what about second-hand smoke? The internet is already filling up with a toxic cloud of AI-generated sludge—soulless articles, fake reviews, vapid social media comments. Even if you try to abstain, you’re still breathing it in. As The Verge has documented, the information ecosystem is becoming polluted for everyone.

We are outsourcing our thinking one query at a time, and celebrating it as innovation.

One day, our kids will find pictures of us, hunched over our glowing screens, prompting away, and they’ll look at us with the same pity we feel for those black-and-white photos of passengers smoking on an airplane. They’ll wonder how we could have been so blind.

Tell me I am wrong.