If you’ve ever watched Star Trek: Voyager, you might remember the episode where a transporter accident fuses two crewmembers—Tuvok, the disciplined Vulcan, and Neelix, the talkative morale officer and ship’s chef—into one hybrid being named Tuvix.
Oh, and also a plant that Neelix was carrying with him to be beamed back aboard the ship.
So in other words, everything being beamed up onto the ship’s transporter platform was merged into a single being, rather than separate individuals, one of which was holding that plant from the planet’s surface.
Tuvix wasn’t evil or broken. He’s just… too much.
He’s logical and emotional, calm and excitable, efficient and scattered.
He tries to be everything at once—and ends up a little confusing.
Sound familiar?
That’s similar to what happens every time you feed an AI like ChatGPT or your LLM of choice (I use Magai for a mix) a long, over-stuffed prompt full of questions.
When Your Output Gets “Tuvixed”
Writers love efficiency, so we think, “If I ask eight questions at once in a single prompt, I’ll get eight answers in one go.”
But AI doesn’t reason the way people do.
If you give it eight questions, it won’t combine or prioritize them—it’ll often answer all eight one at a time. Even if two responses overlap, the chat will still produce two distinct and perhaps full paragraphs, because its job is to complete every pattern you feed it.
The result?
- Repetition.
- Contradictions.
- Lots of polite filler words that make you feel like something profound just happened.
It’s not intelligence—it’s a Tuvix response: a fusion of half-connected thoughts trying to satisfy every instruction at once.
AI Mirrors Human Suggestibility
Another example I’ve seen repeatedly is when you tell your LLM of choice “do this, but don’t do that“, it can sometimes, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, see the words “this” and “that”, and then proceed to do both things, including what you explicitly told it not to do.
If you tell someone not to think of a purple elephant, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? The very idea you put there by telling them not to think about; the purple elephant.
Remember that moment in the original Ghostbusters (1984) when Gozer tells the team to choose the form of their destroyer? They all try to clear their minds—but Ray can’t help it. “It just popped in there,” he says about the most harmless thing he could think of, and seconds later the giant building-sized Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lumbers through New York, stepping on cars while people flee its path.
The same thing happens with AI: if your prompt includes, “Don’t mention X,” the model will likely mention it anyway because you’ve planted the seed. Like Ray’s fluffy nemesis, it can’t un-imagine what you told it not to imagine.
The clearer and more positive your prompt, the smaller the Marshmallow Man you’ll have to clean up after. Like Tuvok, Neelix (and that plant), everything that was beamed up to the space ship was merged; likewise, everything in your prompt will get merged, correctly or incorrectly, into the output you receive from the chat.
Why AI Can’t Filter Like You
Humans naturally compress and summarize information.
If you ask me eight related questions about your chapter, I’ll probably say, “Those first three are really the same issue—let’s tackle that first.”
AI can’t do that unless you tell it to.
It doesn’t recognize redundancy or importance; it just pattern-matches.
So when your prompt merges multiple tasks—analysis, rewriting, summarizing, brainstorming—it tries to be Tuvok and Neelix (and the plant) all at once.
And like the Voyager crew discovered, that rarely ends well.
How to “Un-Tuvix” Your Prompts
Here’s how to get cleaner, smarter results:
- Ask one clear question at a time.
Instead of dumping everything in one paragraph, break it into small, sequential asks. - Tell the model to consolidate.
Example: “Look at these eight questions and tell me which ones overlap or don’t need separate answers.” That forces it to think like Tuvok, not talk like Tuvix. - Work in dialogue, not monologue.
Treat AI like a conversation partner. Respond, refine, redirect. You’ll get depth instead of word count. - Request brevity.
Add a constraint: “Answer in 3 bullet points or less.” Constraints sharpen clarity. - Edit with discernment.
AI can fill space, but only you can determine what’s worth keeping. That’s your human edge.
Side note for later: other ways I use AI in my writing.
OR avoid the Tuvix problem in the first place
When you overload your AI with too many questions, you’re not saving time—you’re multiplying clutter. You’re fusing logic and chaos into a single, over-helpful hybrid that sounds smart but isn’t.
You don’t need more tools—you need better direction. If you’d like help structuring your ideas, shaping your message, or using AI as your creative partner (not your ghostwriter), Schedule a call with me.
