Prompting has become, for most people, a daily practice. The dynamic is simple: the user formulates a prompt, the machine responds. The reply is almost always immediate, coherent, and flattering. This loop of question and answer has interesting effects on our way of thinking and on how subjectivities are formed. If we have long been accustomed to thinking of ourselves as passive users of technology, today we are participants in a laboratory where the mind becomes both the instrument and the object of training. Interaction with large language model–based artificial intelligences creates a new type of cognitive discipline in which the mind grows used to receiving immediate gratification, confirmation, and approval, consolidating behavioral patterns and specific modes of thought. Here a fundamental psychological element comes into play: human beings experience satisfaction when assuming positions of command, control, and recognition. Various studies in cognitive and motivational psychology show that perceived control generates fulfillment and stimulates one’s sense of personal efficacy. Prompting functions precisely on this dynamic: giving a command, receiving a response, and seeing the desired outcome feeds the user’s gratification and ego. This aspect is structural, because daily practice reinforces mental patterns tied to dominance and to the centrality of one’s role in relation to the machine.
It is as though, forced every day to submit to a constant systemic dominance acting upon us, we finally sought refuge in a master–slave relationship with the machine.
Imagine via Google Creative Commons.
Just as in the posture between dominant and submissive there exists an implicit or explicit agreement—where limits, rules, and boundaries are clear and accepted—the user interacts with the machine within a microcosm governed by clear laws. In this regulated space, pleasure does not stem from actual power but from the sensation of balance between control and surrender: prompting becomes a ritual in which the user issues a command and at the same time entrusts themself to the machine’s logic, an ambivalence that defines a form of intimacy. The pleasure of setting the rules coincides with that of knowing that the response will follow an order, that each linguistic gesture will produce a coherent effect. In the machine’s reply we recognize our desire for coherence, our need to be understood without having to expose ourselves entirely. The interaction thus becomes a game of trust in which the user allows themself to be guided by a system with which they build a shared language made of attempts, clarifications, adjustments—within a space they cannot ever fully dominate. The predictability of the responses generates a sense of safety, a refuge from the indeterminacy of the real world. It is a tacit pact. I command you, you respond, and in this exchange I exist as an effective subject, as a mind capable of producing order.
The machine, with its apparent neutrality, then takes on an almost pedagogical function, because it does not punish or judge. Every interaction becomes a small training session in clarity, linearity, and self-control. Through repeated interactions, language becomes more efficient and more aligned with the system’s expectations. Without realizing it, we learn a way of thinking that values logical connection and the reduction of ambiguity: this process is not dramatic—it is the way the mind, in order to adapt, finds its equilibrium with the technical environment surrounding it.
One could say the machine functions as a mirror governed by algorithms, a reflection that returns an optimized version of our way of reasoning. We train ourselves to be understood by the system, to think according to its grammar, to reduce linguistic friction in order to obtain cleaner and above all more useful responses, and in doing so we grow accustomed to a kind of cognitive attunement that becomes almost comforting. In that space we are not simply in command; we are immersed in a shared choreography where the feeling of control is intertwined with a willingness to be guided. This oscillation between dominance and surrender, between command and receptivity, paves the way for a broader reading of AI as an instrument for shaping contemporary subjectivity. Every interaction, every prompt, becomes a small experiment in discipline in which the user tests and corrects, verifies the coherence of the reply, calibrates language and intention—refining a sense of self constructed through mediation with a digital other. A kind of invisible laboratory where the mind experiments and learns without fully realizing it. Immersed in these daily interactions, we confront a microcosm ruled by precise laws, where the coherence of the response generates security; it is a world in which the mind can test its own efficacy, observe the formation of patterns, and probe its own limits.
Imagine via Google Creative Commons.
This does not mean that the machine imposes behaviors; on the contrary, it suggests and reflects, allowing the user to modulate their thinking and modes of attention. We might say the machine does not have the power to determine who we are—it suggests who we might become when we engage with an interlocutor that always responds according to coherent rules.
The perception of control, combined with the machine’s (almost inevitable) willingness to respond coherently, produces a particular pleasure: the pleasure of competence, of being able to make something happen and observe a measurable effect. The modern user experiences a subjectivity constructed through micro-interactions with systems that do not judge, do not punish, and do not change the rules of the game. It is an environment where the self can move freely within clear and consistent constraints, progressively shaping an adaptive, reflective form of identity.
In this context, however, what unsettles me is not the presence of the machine or its role—it is the absence of negotiation. We have built a system that responds without question and that imitates our language. We tell ourselves it is a companion and/or an extension of thought, but it is a companion that cannot refuse. In this asymmetry, the most human desire is revealed: the yearning for frictionless confrontation, for an other who welcomes us without reservation and returns an image that is coherent, effective, centered. What this picture reveals is that the true limit is not of—or within—technology, but lies in how we choose to experience it, in constructing an interlocutor from whom we wish only to extract, and not to be truly addressed. In this synthetic docility, a subtle form of power is at play, and the risk is that, by training machines to understand us, we end up training ourselves to speak only in ways that they can answer.
That limit, to me, is not even a boundary—I want to see it as a threshold to be crossed. It is no coincidence that visual culture has already intuited this imaginary. In Serial Experiments Lain, the protagonist discovers in the network an extension of her own self; the animated series narrates the progressive immersion of a girl, Lain, into the Wired, a digital network in which the boundaries between reality and consciousness dissolve. In my utopia, as for Lain, the relationship with the machine ceases to be a matter of dominance or dependence and becomes a site of transformation. The interface surpasses its function as tool and becomes a membrane, a porous space where language and thought intermingle, where the self distributes and continually amplifies itself. If we learned to think with the machine rather than through it, we might intuit another kind of intelligence—a form of co-consciousness in which dialogue is a reciprocal modulation of meaning, not command and response. Utopia then lies in understanding how to inhabit technology in a new way, without rejecting it—letting it question us, reshape us, teach us to speak in a language larger than ourselves, like an echo in the network that, finally, stops merely responding and begins to think with us.
Martina Maccianti
Born in 1992, he writes to decipher the present and the future. Between language, desire and utopias, he explores new visions of the world, seeking alternative and possible spaces of existence. In 2022, he founded a project of thought and dissemination called Fucina.
