> most people don’t use ai this way though

How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).

> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it

In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.

> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output

This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.

When working on a problem models will walk you down a garden path requiring only yes/no answers or very brief clarifications for a long time. It's always proposing its own workarounds/suggestions/etc. Especially if trying to debug something where it has more understanding than the user so really all it needs from you is "uh sure try that too I guess" from time to time.

And sometimes the debugging has already veered completely off course at the beginning so it's futile, but each time the fleeting hope that just a few thousand more tokens will magically fix it tempts you to keep going a little longer.

> How do they use it?

as an example, i was using chatgpt a few weeks back to help me remember the name of a painting i’d seen about a decade ago. i could recall the general shape of the subject and that it was europeanish, but nothing else. after seven turns or so it finally got it, and honestly, the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot

i’ve had a similar feeling of success after trying to get it to give a comprehensible answer when asking it for a solid counter-argument to philosophical questions. it is indeed often crazy and frustrating

> but I get the same reward when I code by hand

i have only done very simple coding work with llms, so that may be why our ideas differ about the feeling of reward. this is where the comparison to gacha makes more sense than slots, since when you’re coding, you still get a reward each turn whilst chasing the final/desired result

I have this thing with a wallpaper with a small island, a (tiny?) house, a pier and a boat. Probably somewhere in Canada or Scandinavia. Had it on my PC in the 90s and no model was able to help me with this.

> the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot

I understand the joy of success but I fail to see how this is gambling. I could have an equivalent conversation with a friend (more likely about a movie in trying to remember than a painting, but still) and get the exact same type of iterative “no, not that one, it was more like X” and feel elated when my friend finally realizes I’m taking about a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine.

This isn’t gambling in any meaningful sense.

sorry, maybe my english is failing me here. what i was getting at is that using ai feels like gambling to me, where tokens, time, etc. are wagered against the chance for desired output. the risk is that you waste your tokens/time, and the prize is a useful answer (if not the exact code/solution/whatever one was hoping for)

i wasn’t trying to convince you, i’m just explaining that this is gambling in a meaningful sense to some people, especially with how turn-based and unpredictable the whole system is. whether it is actually gambling (semantically, legally, ontologically?) isn’t really interesting imo. what’s interesting is that it’s structured similarly and feels nearly identical to some people

but then, i also feel like there’s an element of gambling in the example of you talking with your friend, though i think it would be better illustrated if it was a conversation with a random person

I just wanted to chime in that there is nothing wrong with your English. I'm a native English speaker and I, too, find using an LLM to accomplish something to be very gambling-like. You're wagering something of value (your allotted tokens, and your time) on an unpredictable outcome that you hope benefits you.

thanks, i really appreciate the kind words. it’s just such a precise language that i worry i might be accidentally adding (or not including) important subtext in discussions like this

I agree with the other commenter. Your English is perfectly good. Your subjective experience is your own and I can’t disagree with that.

I’m working from a place where my employer pays for my tokens so I’m also not spending anything except my time. Maybe if I were, it would feel more like gambling.