Doom Prompting: AI’s Version of Doomscrolling
Remember doomscrolling? That late-night spiral where you promised yourself just one more swipe on Twitter, only to wake up at 2 a.m. wondering why you know so much about a stranger’s sourdough starter? Well, AI has given us a sequel: doom prompting.
Instead of endlessly scrolling social feeds, we’re now endlessly feeding prompts into ChatGPT, Claude, and their AI cousins. What starts as a thoughtful question quickly turns into a bottomless “conversation.” The machine keeps suggesting, nudging, and asking if you’d like to continue. And like a conveyor belt of snacks that never stops rolling by, you usually grab another one.
The Trap: Bottomless Pages, Not Blank Ones
The old enemy was the blank page. Now, the enemy is the page that never ends. AI promises productivity but often delivers distraction. You start out seeking help with an outline and end up knee-deep in a 20-message debate with your AI about whether your opening line of an article should include a metaphor about fantasy football.
This isn’t harmless. Just like doomscrolling made us passive consumers, doomprompting risks making us passive creators. Instead of exercising our own judgment, we get lulled into negotiating with an algorithm that never tires and never says, “Maybe you should stop.”
Why It Matters for Leaders
Executives know time is a scarce resource. The illusion with AI is that it’s saving you time, when in reality it may be hijacking it. The dopamine hit isn’t likes or retweets; it’s the feeling of productivity. AI flatters you with drafts, iterations, and suggestions, but much of it is just statistical averages dressed up in polished prose.
And here’s the real risk: when you outsource thinking, you outsource growth. Writing isn’t just communication; it is how we clarify strategy, sharpen ideas, and decide where to steer organizations. If AI takes over too much of that process, you may get polished outputs but hollow insights.
A World of “Writes” and “Write-Nots”
Paul Graham once warned that the future may divide us into “writes” and “write-nots.” In other words, people who still know how to write (and therefore think), and those who don’t.
That should send a chill down the spine of anyone who’s watched skills quietly vanish when technology made them optional. After all, you don’t need blacksmiths until the day you need a horseshoe. You may not need to draft a memo line-by-line — until you realize your organization can’t distinguish its own thinking from generic AI boilerplate.
Avoiding the Doom Loop
So how do leaders harness AI without sliding into doomprompting? A few principles stand out:
Demand friction. Tools that make you think harder, not easier, will sharpen your edge.
Value deliberation over efficiency. Speed is intoxicating but sometimes shallow. Strategy often lives in the slow lane.
Resist sycophantic AI. A “yes-bot” doesn’t challenge your assumptions. Look for AI systems that push back.
Find human sparring partners. The best antidote to AI passivity is still a sharp colleague (or even a contrarian friend).
Preserve the core. Use AI upstream for brainstorming or downstream for editing, but keep the “main thing” — the actual argument — human.
Closing Thought: Productivity vs. Thoughtfulness
The contest isn’t between humans and machines — it’s between two models of human-machine interaction. One treats cognition as a commodity to be optimized for convenience. The other preserves the messy, valuable process of real human thinking.
Every executive should be asking: am I using AI to sharpen my mind, or to soften it? Because in a world of doomprompting, the blank page might turn out to have been the better problem after all.