Comic Strips

it's maybe because chatbots incorporate, accidentally or not, elements of what makes gambling addiction work on humans https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

the gist:

There’s a book on this — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, from 2014. This is the how-to on getting people addicted to your mobile app. [Amazon UK, Amazon US]

Here’s Eyal’s “Hook Model”:

First, the trigger is what gets you in. e.g., you see a chatbot prompt and it suggests you type in a question. Second is the action — e.g., you do ask the bot a question. Third is the reward — and it’s got to be a variable reward. Sometimes the chatbot comes up with a mediocre answer — but sometimes you love the answer! Eyal says: “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” Intermittent rewards are the key tool to create an addiction. Fourth is the investment — the user puts time, effort, or money into the process to get a better result next time. Skin in the game gives the user a sunk cost they’ve put in. Then the user loops back to the beginning. The user will be more likely to follow an external trigger — or they’ll come to your site themselves looking for the dopamine rush from that variable reward.

Eyal said he wrote Hooked to promote healthy habits, not addiction — but from the outside, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference. Because the model is, literally, how to design a poker machine. Keep the lab rats pulling the lever.

chatbots users also are attracted to their terminally sycophantic and agreeable responses, and also some users form parasocial relationships with motherfucking spicy autocomplete, and also chatbots were marketed to management types as a kind of futuristic status symbol that if you don't use it you'll fall behind and then you'll all see. people get mixed gambling addiction/fomo/parasocial relationship/being dupes of multibillion dollar advertising scheme and that's why they get so unserious about their chatbot use

and also separately core of openai and anthropic and probably some other companies are made from cultists that want to make machine god, but it's entirely different rabbit hole

like with any other bubble, money for it won't last forever. most recently disney sued midjourney for copyright infringement, and if they set legal precedent, they might take wipe out all of these drivel making machines for good

Because rich morons think they'll get free digital slaves out of it. Because they're rich morons who do not understand anything they ask for.

Because AI is mostly built for tech outsiders. They literally thought that digital art, composing music on the computer, programming, etc. was literally telling the computer what to do. I remember around 2015 someone asking where they can choose art-styles in Photoshop, and what to tell the PC to draw something. Even I as a child thought that you just had to type "please draw me a car" into the Commodore 64 to draw you a car, without all the pixel-art.

I tend to call these "normie tech". Tech that is built for non-enthusiasts, which have negative consequences to the others, and even fool the some enthusiasts into worshipping them. If only I foresaw the dangers of overtly centralized social media...

That's because there's a non zero amount of actually functionality. Chatgpt does some useful stuff for normal people. It's accessible.

Contrast that to crypto, which was only accessible to tech folks and barely useful, or NFT which had no use at all.

Ok, I guess to be fair, the purpose of NFT was to separate chumps from their money, and it was quite good at that.

It seems to me that lots more people have completely lost their minds this time

That's not really an AI thing, that's just... everything.

The internet did not end up in the trash heap after the dot com bubble burst. Ai too has real world uses that go beyond the current planet wrecking bubble.