@cancel this reflects my experience pretty strongly.

I've been pretty staunchly opposed to this wave of gen-AI since chatGPT launched in 2022, and never intentionally touched it until three months ago, when I finally felt like I needed to spend at least a little bit of time with it to understand/prove what I was opposed to. it almost *immediately* triggered an addiction response (of the gambling category, as you pointed out), to the point where within a week I could barely sleep, and all I could think about was prompting, explicitly like I needed to be using it 24/7 and trying to figure out the right way to extract quality output from it, under this sudden manufactured feeling of urgency.

luckily, i got burnt out on it pretty "quickly" (roughly a month) which forced me to step back, and had lived long enough to be able to identify what this cycle was. It was also tremendously helpful to both have had a long critical perspective built against the tech that I had now tested against, and a really high bar of personal work quality that I was able to use to categorize that output of these tools as "complete shit".

it's wild to me that as someone who was pretty publicly and vocally against the principle of the tech, this addiction loop still hit me at full force, on the very first prompt I ever fed it. for people without the life experience, critical lens, and body of high quality personal work to measure against, I can't imagine how many could possibly escape from the slot machine cycle. "if I can just figure out exactly how to word this prompt, it'll solve all my problems...". I wonder how those who do escape don't talk about it publicly out of shame (me, until this post).

the silver lining for me personally is that it did end up having some kind of positive effect on how I approach my work. reading through so much slop for a month re-lit a fire within me to be even more intentional and human in my work, whether through writing or code.