Conjuration vs. Illusion
They put the sparkle on the button because they want you to think it’s magic.
And look, I get it. It can sort of feel that way, especially at first. The intoxication of power. With just this little prompt, I made all this. I cast this spell, and now there are twenty pages of content where there were none. Now there’s a picture of a hummingbird with a cute little backpack. Now there’s a web site, and just look at all those emojis! So whimsical.
And of course it feels that way, because they want it to feel that way. Like magic. They want you to feel like a sorceror because they hope that if you feel like a sorceror you’ll be willing to pay to keep feeling like one.
“I added this one sentence to my prompts and ChatGPT got so much smarter,” claims every third page on the internet right now. Because if you have the secret knowledge needed to word the spell in just the right way, your magic will be better than everyone else’s. If I tell it not to make mistakes and then it doesn’t make mistakes, I can take credit for the lack of mistakes. If I tell it not to hallucinate, I can trust the results, because why would it hallucinate when I’ve specifically asked it not to?
At work I’m getting five-paragraph answers to very simple questions. In the past these questions would not have merited a five-paragraph response; now they do not merit the time it would take to reduce five paragraphs of magic slop down to a simple answer. Requirements documents that could have been five sentences and some bullet points are now twenty pages long, and almost everything in those pages doesn’t contradict itself, but some of it does, and now instead of skimming to get the idea, I have to slog through all of it, the important and the irrelevant and the hallucinated, without any clues as to which is which. Anyone can type into the chat box and get a design now, and they come up to you all excited, like a child who’s just drawn a unicorn, and you have to smile and tell them it’s very good, even though its eyes are different sizes and the information architecture makes no sense.
But there are different schools of magic. And maybe this makes you feel like you’re a Conjuror, creating solid reality where there was none through deft wording and sheer grit. But rub your finger across it, blow on it, and it collapses into spiderwebs and dew. It was never really there. You’re casting Illusions. Your slide deck is so comprehensive that you get antsy five slides from the end because you feel like you’ve already said all of this, so you awkwardly wrap up.
All the guides to writing good prompts are careful to point out that you get better results if you are clear about your goals, gather the appropriate resources, and provide examples of the kind of output you want. By the time you’ve done all that, you’re 90% of the way to just creating whatever you’re about to ask the AI to create for you. So maybe there is magic here, and maybe it’s actually Enchantment. Maybe the AI has you doing the legwork you could have been doing all along.
And look, I know these things can be effective. I’m not naive enough to think they don’t have uses. But I’m looking forward to the day when we stop treating them like magic, and start treating them as tools.