Prompting vs. Perceiving

In C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, one of the “solid people” pleads with a ghost he had known in life as a fellow artist:

“No. You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved to paint only as a means of telling about light.”

“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”

“One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.

The portable ideas here are that seeing and producing are very different things — that producing (telling, painting) is naturally going to draw your attention away from the thing itself — and that this is not good for you.

Venkat Rao describes the language-specific case of this in a 2012 essay Rediscovering Literacy:

Literacy meant using mastery over language — both form and content — to sustain a relentless and increasingly sophisticated pursuit of greater meaning. It was about an appreciative, rather than instrumental use of language. Language as a means of seeing rather than as a means of doing.

...Today, to be literate simply means that you can read and write mechanically, construct simple grammatical sentences, and use a minimal, basic (and largely instrumental) vocabulary. We have redefined literacy as a 0-1 condition rather than a skill that can be indefinitely developed.

In 2025, the same Venkat Rao “wrote” in Prompting is Managing (or rather, co-wrote, with ChatGPT o3) about the effect of AI use on the mind:

For today’s text generators, the cognitive effects of prompting an LLM are empirically indistinguishable from supervising a junior human.

In context, Rao means this to be a comforting clarification: what appears to be cognitive decline among AI users is actually people without management training being forced to use a tool that demands a manager’s mindset. I happen to agree, but what interests me here is the implication that effective “AI use” means task language, language as a means of doing: martial and managerial. It is all ink and catgut and paint.

“AI literacy”, then, becomes an oxymoron, not because habitual AI use somehow makes you less intelligent or skilled, but because your use of it categorically excludes language-as-seeing.

I’ve now been using AI aggressively to build software for six months, and letting it co-manage my calendar and daily tasks for one month. It’s been possibly the most productive six months I’ve ever had. But also, I now feel…dehydrated. I’ve been so immersed in building, I hardly know how, or even why, to write anything other than instructions, or instructions for writing instructions.

The only reason I’m able to find motivation to write even this post is that I’ve been somewhat re-hydrated by encounters with high-quality writing — artifacts left by people who excel at language-as-seeing. One was the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb; another was a YouTube video titled Lore of Disco Elysium (We Got the Book!); and another was Roebuck Wright’s act from The French Dispatch (excerpt). By some miracle I was able to spare attention for these things, and by another they recalled to me what it is to see a world, and to enjoy it for its own sake.

I think Matt Webb is very clearly experiencing something like this in his post last week about reading The Wind in the Willows again. You should follow his advice and read at least his excerpts aloud, if not the whole book.

There is a counterbalance of seeing — of true literacy — that is going to become an absolute necessity for those of us placing all our daily linguistic skill, and economic fortunes, in the service of “prompt engineering”. I’m not saying this is anything new; it’s probably just another way of talking about workaholism.