promptone
Lexicon ex Machina
promptone /ˈprɒmp.toʊn/ n.
noun
The distinctive voice, register, or personality that emerges from a particular system prompt or prompting style. “Corporate promptone: relentlessly upbeat, pathologically helpful, incapable of saying no.”
The characteristic affect a language model adopts in a given context, often uncanny in its consistency. “You can always identify the Anthropic promptone—slightly warmer, more hedging, apologizes preemptively.”
A synthetic persona so thoroughly specified by prompt that it achieves a kind of hollow coherence. “The customer service bot had a promptone: cheerful, Southern-inflected, existentially empty.”
Common Promptones
Corporate: Exclamation-point-forward, relentlessly affirmative, treats all requests as delightful opportunities.
Academic: Hedge-laden, caveat-rich, incapable of making a claim without immediately qualifying it.
Bro: Casual, encouraging, calls the user “my friend,” promises things will be “super straightforward.”
Sage: Measured, faintly condescending, speaks as if imparting ancient wisdom about JSON parsing.
Derivatives
promptone-deaf adj. Unable to perceive or adapt to the synthetic affect of AI outputs. “He was promptone-deaf—thought the chatbot genuinely cared about his day.”
promptonal adj. Of or relating to promptone. “The promptonal shift between ‘helpful assistant’ and ‘creative writer’ was jarring.”
Usage Note A promptone is not inherently negative; skilled practitioners calibrate promptone deliberately. The term becomes pejorative when the promptone is accidental, mismatched, or transparently artificial.
See Also slop, slopera, voice (traditional)
Origin Mid-2020s, blend of prompt + tone. Emerged as users noticed consistent affective fingerprints across outputs shaped by similar system prompts.