I’ve noticed people get a kind of performance anxiety with AI. They feel they have to say exactly the right thing in the prompt, so they freeze up and never actually wrestle with the idea. They treat it like a test instead of a conversation.
It reminds me of what we lost moving to remote work. We lost the magic of being stuck in a room together, where someone says something half-baked as a passing comment and it sparks something nobody would have reached on purpose. The throwaway line was often the valuable one.
AI could be that room, but only if we’re willing to be loose in it. The moment it feels like a performance, the passing comments stop, and the passing comments are where the good stuff hides.
Do you write to AI to get an answer, or to think, and does the difference change how you talk to it?