Flutterby™! : AI as gambling addiction

AI as gambling addiction

2025-06-06 16:30:30.01212+02 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Riffing on AI-first - We're just 6 months away from AGI ;-), which talks about the

I am just one prompt away from getting the right results!”

effect, Pivot to AI: Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! notes:

That is: generative AI works the same way as gambling addiction. Spin the gacha! Just one more spin, bro, I can feel it!

Large language models work the same way as a carnival psychic. Chatbots look smart by the Barnum Effect — which is where you read what’s actually a generic statement about people and you take it as being personally about you. The only intelligence there is yours. [Out Of The Software Crisis, 2023; blog post, 2023]

This is how people fall for chatbot girlfriends. They know it’s a bot, but they fall in love with the personality they’ve projected onto the generic statement generator.

Via

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: AI as gambling addiction made: 2025-06-06 23:58:32.421792+02 by: Dan Lyke

Jen, MPH :verified: @tweetsjen@med-mastodon.com

@briankrebs bookmarking this one! Love the cocaine analogy!

“Coincidentally, Natalie Ponte on LinkedIn posted today: try replacing “ai” with “cocaine” in all the posts you read about it. it’s pretty funny

Let’s try it!

“My cocaine skeptic friends are all nuts, they’ll be left behind.”

“Cocaine isn’t going to replace you. Someone using cocaine is going to replace you.” Checks out.

Cocaine doesn’t make you a business genius — it just makes you think you’re a business genius. Same for AI.”

Add your own comment:

(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)

Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke

for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.