CONCEPT
The Prompter as Diagnostician
Groys's reframing of AI use: the prompter is not a tool-user but a cultural analyst interrogating the zeitgeist — the response reveals the archive's structure, biases, and exclusions rather than providing the answer to a question.
If AI is the zeitgeist-machine — the embodied spirit of the age, the objectification of accumulated culture — then the act of prompting is not a technical operation but a diagnostic one. The prompter who writes a query and reads the machine's response is not using a tool. She is interrogating a culture. She is asking: what does the accumulated mass of human thought produce when subjected to this specific pressure? What patterns emerge? What assumptions surface? What blind spots become visible through their consistent, systematic absence? Groys's framework positions the prompter as analyst, the response as evidence, and the archive as the proper object of study.
In The You On AI Field Guide
This reframing transforms the evaluative standard for AI use. The conventional framing evaluates prompting by its productivity: did the query produce useful output? The diagnostic framing evaluates prompting by its analytical yield: did the query reveal something about the culture