Prompt Anxiety
The phantasmagorias of space to which the flaneur devotes himself find a counterpart in the phantasmagorias of time to which the gambler is addicted. Gambling converts time into a narcotic (Benjamin 2002: 12).
The disruption that Walter Benjamin identified in the gambling halls in the early 20th century finds unexpected resonance in today's computational interfaces. The rise of "prompt engineering" as a new technical practice to shape the outputs of LLMs reveals an engagement with probability and chance that I claim mirrors the temporal and psychological structures that Benjamin identified in his Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk). In Benjamin's short fragment, Notes on a Theory of Gambling, for example, there emerges a figure that I want to explore as of particular relevance for our computational moment: the gambler (Benjamin 2006: 297-298). Benjamin's gambler is not merely a person who bets, but a temporal person haunted by chance, perpetually suspended between possibility and ruin. As Marasco argues,
The critique of the gambler is as much a way to honor the dream-wish harbored in aleatory experience as to decipher its historical shape. It is an attempt to do justice to a structure of desire that is itself produced by structures of power and possibility. Benjamin’s position is refreshingly ambivalent: the allegory of the gambler is an indication of ideology and insurgency, bourgeois mendacity and revolutionary vitality, a conservative desire to keep the present order as is and the radical urge for its undoing. It is both at once. Perhaps this explains some of its distinctive charms (Marasco 2018: 5).
"The particular danger that threatens the gambler," Benjamin writes, "lies in the fateful category of arriving 'too late,' of having 'missed the opportunity'" (quoted in Marasco 2018: 2). This figure operates through what Benjamin calls purely reflexive moves, responses that occur at the threshold where calculation meets catastrophe, where the systematic meets the aleatory. The gambler's relation to time is therefore disruptive; where each wager represents not a step in a progressive sequence but a moment that "kills time" itself, collapsing futurity into the eternal present of the dice roll.
This temporal compression generates what I want to explore through the concept of "prompt anxiety." I argue this is a distinctive psychological condition where users experience each output from the LLM as a wager against unknown algorithmic possibilities. We see online forums dedicated to prompt engineering which often reveal users developing obsessive strategies for controlling outputs that remain uncontrollable. Consider the elaborate "prompt libraries" that have emerged around LLM generation, featuring thousands of tested combinations designed to produce particular aesthetic effects (see Oppenlaender 2022). These libraries can be seen as similar to gambling systems, promising users greater control over outcomes whilst acknowledging that no prompt can guarantee specific results. The psychological mechanisms underlying these practices might therefore reveal deeper structural parallels with gambling behaviour.
This psychological dimension of prompt engineering perhaps exhibits what Richard Hofstadter identified in political discourse as "the paranoid style." This is a tendency toward elaborate interpretative schemes designed to explain apparently random outcomes through hidden systematic patterns (Hofstadter 1966). Users tend to develop complex theories about "hidden biases" in training data, "prompt injection" techniques, and "model alignment" issues that supposedly explain why their carefully crafted prompts produce unexpected outputs. These theories perhaps serve a similar psychological function to gambling superstitions, providing the illusion of systematic control over processes that remain stochastic. This "paranoid" interpretative tendency finds material reinforcement in the technical architecture of LLM systems themselves.
I argue that the technical architecture of these systems actively encourages this paranoid style through what developers call "prompt sensitivity" (Zhuo, J. et al 2024). Prompt sensitivity describes how minor alterations in input, such as adding or removing a single word, can produce dramatically different outputs, transforming realistic portraits into abstract art or factual explanations into creative fiction. This sensitivity creates what users experience as "prompt paranoia," what Best describes as "a new kind of writers block" (Best 2024). Here, every word choice becomes fraught with potential consequences that cannot be predicted in advance.
Users therefore begin to develop elaborate techniques for prompt debugging, by testing multiple variations to identify which elements produce desired effects, creating a form of systematic superstition around text manipulation. Thus configured, the computational interface becomes a site where magical thinking emerges, representing a return to pre-modern epistemologies within ostensibly rational technological systems, where correlation becomes causation and pattern recognition becomes predictive power. This return to magical thinking within computational systems reveals how deeply the gambler's psychology has penetrated our technological interactions, where systematic analysis gives way to superstitious practice. Here, the computational and the ludic meet, revealing how LLM interaction shares the gambler's relationship to chance, calculation, and temporal compression.
The figure of Benjamin's gambler therefore provides a revealing metaphor for understanding the psychological and temporal dimensions of prompt engineering. As users navigate the probabilistic landscape of LLMs, they embody a similar mix of calculation and hope that Benjamin identified in the arcade's gambling halls. As Marasco observes, "with the collapse of rational faith in historical progress and the sinking feeling of domination as destiny, aleatory experience restores vitality to political life and indeterminacy to insurgent forces. It is in his courtship with destruction that the gambler (and the banker) becomes an accidental accomplice to the revolutionary critic" (Marasco 2018: 20). Perhaps, our computational moment may be thereby characterised not by rational design but by a return to chance-based epistemologies, where the gambler's temporality, suspended between possibility and ruin, becomes a new, potentially revolutionary, mode of technological engagement.
** Headline image generated using DALL-E 3 in June 2025. The prompt used was: "An oil painting portrays four people from diverse ethnic backgrounds engaged with digital gambling apps on their devices against a warm, muted beige wall. The individuals—each exhibiting concentrated expressions—are focused on their phones, tablets, laptops, and smartwatches, highlighting meticulous details in skin, hair, and devices, with soft, warm lighting enhancing the scene's depth and emotional balance." Due to the probabilistic way in which these images are generated, future images generated using this prompt are unlikely to be the same as this version.
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