An AI-literacy talk
50 First Prompts
the movie taught us how language models learn — without knowing it.
01
Our guy
Meet Henry.
He trains sea lions and walruses for a living — patient, funny, brilliant with any creature that can’t break his heart. People are the harder part.
Parameters. Who he is got built over years, then set — it shows up on its own, without him thinking about it. A trained model is the same: its character is baked in, then frozen.
02
And her
Meet Lucy.
An artist who turns up at the same diner every morning, always orders the waffles — and builds something different out of them every single time.
Same order, never the same result. Same booth, same waffles — never the same creation twice. The interesting part was never the order.
00
They meet
He meets a girl at the diner. It just clicks.
Sun through the window, her favourite song on the radio, waffles between them.
Context. The input was never just what he said. The whole room — light, music, mood, the food — shapes the moment. When it all lines up, the output feels like magic.
00
The next morning
He comes back. She has no idea who he is.
And it’s never the same morning twice — not the same sun, not the same song, so not the same response.
No two contexts ever really repeat. Nothing carried over from yesterday, and even today’s details have shifted — so what comes back is new every time. Same Lucy; never the same moment.
00
What happened
It started on a pineapple run.
A year ago, a wreck on the way home. Ever since, she wakes each morning sure it’s still that same Sunday.
The cutoff. Past this point, nothing new is written to long-term memory. For a model it’s the training cut-off — the day the world keeps moving and it doesn’t.
00
She’s not the only one
At the clinic, he meets Ten-Second Tom.
Same condition — but Tom’s window is only ten seconds wide.
It’s the size of the window, not the size of the mind. Tom and Lucy aren’t less able — they just hold less at once. How much you can keep in view is its own dial, separate from how much you know.
00
Her whole life now
Every morning, it’s the same day again.
The loop. Wake up new → meet him for the first time → fall for him → lose it all by morning → wake up new again. Nothing survives the night — and it began with a pineapple.
00
How they cope
They rebuild the same day, every day.
Staged birthdays, planted props — a whole world kept consistent so it still makes sense to her.
Coherence theatre. The continuity isn’t in her; it’s staged around her by the people in the room. With a stateless model, keeping the world coherent is your job, not its feature.
00
The catch
She reads the same newspaper every single day.
It’s perfectly consistent. It’s also a lie — the world moved on without her.
Grounding ≠ truth. A frozen, controlled source buys you consistency and falsehood in the same move. Grounded garbage is still garbage.
09
His way through
One tape, played first thing, before anything else.
Not him repeating himself all day — her whole context set at the start: here’s what happened, here’s who you are, here’s who loves you.
Set the context up front, all at once. Establish the whole picture before the day begins and it runs on its own. It’s the system prompt — and it’s the answer Henry only lands on at the very end.
00
He stops repeating himself
He points at the one thing that already gets through.
He smells like her father’s fishing boat — and some part of her leans toward it before she knows why.
Retrieval. A high-signal cue activates a prior already baked in. Don’t make it recall — hand it the key to a room it already has.
12
He keeps trying
Same lines. Some mornings they land, some they bomb.
He’s sure the joke is the variable. It isn’t — the room is.
You can’t copy-paste an outcome. Repeating the exact words won’t recreate the result when you don’t understand the context around them. Same prompt, different surroundings, different reply.
00
Where the analogy ends
She starts to keep him.
Without knowing how.
She’s painted his face hundreds of times — from dreams she can’t remember having.
This is where carbon and silicon part. Durable, unconscious retention — love that compounds without being reloaded — is biology. Weights don’t do it. The machine never paints you back.
14