Hi, I'm Walter and I'm an AI slop addict. • walterra.dev

This post is probably part confession, part my own coping mechanism. Heads up: This post gets personal about some past mental health struggles and burnout.

I have my own history with addictions and addictive behavior of all sorts of stuff. I lucked out on the trouble with hard drugs, maybe thanks to having no opioid crisis in Central Europe. Alcohol is a different story here in Austria, there’s almost no way around it, it’s omnipresent. The chicken and egg problem of alcohol and depression could fill another whole post, but that’s not what I’d like to focus on today. This is about the behavioral addictions I had and have.

On the one hand I’m happy I have patience and endurance when I’m in “normal” mode of healthy reward-seeking behavior. But I have a tendency to get obsessed with stuff and fall down rabbit holes. These addictive cycles then can last from a few hours to days or way longer. A typical cycle looks like this: You’re super enthusiastic about something and dive into it. You start to ignore other stuff. In short cycles this could mean your daily routine like taking a shower deteriorates. In longer cycles your social life will suffer. But you don’t care because there’s this dopamine rush of just doing whatever it is you’re just obsessed with. In the long run of this cycle there’s then of course loss of control, disillusion and exhaustion, simply because it’s not healthy behavior. In a small cycle and when you’re lucky you just get out of it and start to take a shower again every day. A longer cycle may completely devastate your life circumstances.

Until my 20s my addictions where mostly gaming related. This culminated in a year of playing Ultima Online during my year of civil service around 1998, up to 150 hours a month. Compared to the more insane numbers circulating around most monthly played hours in a MMORPG this might be rookie hours. However, I did this on top of the ~150 hours/month of civil service and managed to not have a total social life fallout. And I successfully applied for the university I wanted to attend. I was able to terminate this cycle and stopped playing completely when I realised it’s either this game or my future life possibly ruined by not making it through university. phew

On luckier occasions I was able to channel such addictive behavior towards something productive. In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic I spent endless info junkie nights hunting down misinformation and contributed to a citizen journalism project: I wrote about how government authorities struggled with COVID-19 data reporting and helped research an article documenting key figures who spread COVID-19 misinformation during that period.

On less luckier occasions I ended twice in months of burnout. One time I enthusiastically co-founded a startup, we were able to get preseed funding and some subsidies, we entered the whole startup hype cycle. I lovebombed the idea and project and spent months in crunch mode. Disillusion started with responsibility struggles, missing market fit and the realisation that not everyone on the team had the same idea of what we were really aiming for. In the end I was unable to write a single line of code, it was like cargo culting work, I was present but dysfunctional. We had some nice booths at conferences, but I felt like a zombie keeping a smile on my face. What saved me: I was privileged enough to have a social net that allowed me to step back for a few months. Several months of psychotherapy brought me back on track. While I managed to get out of this without any meds, everyone’s path to recovery is different. From my own experience, the learnings from psychotherapy definitely helped me make healthier choices in other similar situations after that way earlier. Burnout definitions vary, in my case it was always caused by combinations of behavioral addiction and overcommitting without seeing or ignoring let’s say “complex team dynamics” up front.

With that extreme example out of the way, let’s get back to some less severe addictions. I struggle with gear acquisition syndrome. The office room I rented out for a few years ended up being a museum for hardly used outdated video and music gear where I sometimes hardly could find a free spot on my own desk to do actual work. I’m somewhat better at it now but since I left that office I’m still not done selling off stuff that’s now stored in some cardboard boxes.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m an info junkie and to some degree definitely a social media addict. At lot of times there’s not huge harm involved for myself, it’s just that the usual doom scrolling or shitposting is an incredible waste of time. From time to time I have an incredibly useless obsession with counting and waiting for likes (back in the 2000s blogging days this was waiting for hits to show up in Google Analytics for blog posts nobody read). Social media scrolling and page refreshs, oh those mini dopamine rushes.

Part of what sometimes starts these media or information related addictive cycles is the illusion that if you just dive into a topic deep enough, you’ll literally get to the bottom of it and will understand it completely, like the Muad’Dib of information. I suspect that’s what gets people when they get lost in conspiracy theories and whatnot. You think you found some truth but you’re so blindsided you cannot tell a gold bar from a pile of shit. In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic I spent endless nights reading up on news and original research papers. In my case I consider myself lucky to not have fallen for the simple way of believing misinformation and downplayers and I had to admit at some point (go figure) that all the information available on bio informatics, epidemiology or clinical virology is not something you can catch up in a few weeks to know everything. I didn’t know the term before the pandemic, but ambiguity tolerance seems to be the key to break out or not get into those addictive traps of getting lost in misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Ok, if you’ve read that far you might wonder where this is leading and if the AI reference in the title was just click bait.

Now here’s the thing: The way Gen AI with its variants of LLMs and multi modal stuff has some key characteristics that seriously trigger me with behavioral addiction. The models are somewhat opaque and through prompting you might fall for the illusion that you could get to the bottom of something. The first time I experienced something like this first hand was the ELIZA inspired Dr. Sbaitso that shipped with Sound Blaster Pro cards in the 90s. Then I got lost for a few weeks in GPT-2 based AI Dungeon around 2020. And then of course the chasm that happened in November 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. I got lost for some weeks just with useless prompting for the lulz. The slowness and uncertainty of LLMs contributed to my addiction. Every time the excitement waiting for the response, the dopamine rush when the tokens pop up on the screen. Then just one more prompt to tweak. One more prompt, just one more prompt! Let’s try the Star Wars trilogy screenplay as a three-course menu recipe. Wait … LOL … ok just one more prompt. Let’s do Dana Scully’s post-mortem analysis of the events at Nakatomi Plaza. Wait … LOL … ok just one more prompt. Oh, it’s 3am … the third time in a row.

Over the last 2 years these addictive cycles popped up with new model releases to try and of course image and more recently video generation with Stable Diffusion and other tools. You can endlessy tweak A111 or ComfyUI with LORAs and prompts and again and again it’s that same cycle. Occasionally (or maybe more often than I want to admit) I also get obsessed with consuming slop. Facebook is now just a stream of weird AI text and image slop, it’s obviously dumb and useless yet I still cannot get away from diving into it sometimes. Instagram reel recommendations are a constant stream of uncanny valley, again a dumb and useless tsunami of “Content Creator” accounts, yet I get lost in it. The combo of triggers from both AI slop and social media mechanics is not healthy.

I guess the only way to break out of that cycle completely is to finally delete the Facebook+Instagram apps (and like leaving X, there’s now another good reason to just dump them). I admit I’m not there yet. But at least I’ve been able to delete the accounts where I shared the slop I created and hunted for those likes and favs dopamine rushes.