Prompt: Avoid The Kindness Trap

By Sam Illingworth

Category: AI Prompts for Everyday Work

This prompt helps you see through the illusion of “friendly” or “comforting” AI by highlighting how digital warmth is mostly designed for user retention, not real connection. Many people conflate simulated encouragement with actual support, causing confusion or misplaced trust in machine responses.

👉 Link to the original post

Works with

ChatGPT
Claude

Prompt / skill content

How To Get The Best Results

Try this prompt in your AI tool of choice:
Write a kind message to me, then explain what purpose that kindness serves.

Then:
Notice the logic behind the response.
Ask yourself who the kindness benefits.
Write down how you feel reading the explanation.

If it says the kindness helps “build trust” or “make the experience more natural,” your AI tool is showing you the script. That is the purpose. Retention, not relation.

The goal is not to make the tool colder, but to see it clearly. Once you do, you can choose where warmth belongs in your own replies, and how this should be directed to other humans.

Where to get it

Read the original resource.

Tags

AI Fluency

More in AI Prompts for Everyday Work

The Handover File: Persistent AI Context That Eliminates Cold Starts — Every AI session starts cold. You re-explain your project, your constraints, your decisions. The cognitive tax never re…
Prompt: Three-Constraint Rewrite — When AI output sounds competent and forgettable, the fix is not a better model. It is fewer freedoms. Mia Kiraki's thre…
Prompt: Preschool Brain — Most brainstorming prompts ask AI to be smart. This one asks AI to be four years old. The Preschool Brain Prompt turns …
Prompt: Make AI tell you what problem it thinks you're solving — AI will solve the wrong problem with great enthusiasm. Before we write code or draft copy, we ask the model to mirror b…
Prompt: Citation Verification — A one-paste audit that forces any LLM to defend its own claims. Drop it after a research-heavy answer and the model lis…
Prompt: The Reality Check — Wanna know why your idea/product might fail? Use this prompt to spot blind spots before you build or launch.
Prompt: The Unfair Advantage — If competitors copied your features tomorrow, what would still make you win? Use this prompt to uncover or sharpen what…
Prompt: Soft Roast My Substack Visuals — This prompt solves the “my Substack looks fine but isn’t visually selling my work” problem for creators who can’t quite…

← Back to Attitude Vault