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

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

most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output)

perhaps it’s better to compare it to gacha than slots?

regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “token” brings to mind the coins you’d stick in a slot machine

i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason

How is it going? Hey! So have you seen the new wolf movies? I don't think it's one of those movies where they like they kind of like go in and it's just like, oh, here are all the wolves, I don't know, there's like a big bad. There's a big bad. the main character is a wolf, a young wolf in a family. And then at the beginning of the movie, they get attacked by like the big bad wolves. And then I don't know, I don't know how to say it, but the main character gets separated from the rest of his family. So he's all alone and he has to like go through this adventure to find his family. And there's a lot of action and adventure and like you know, there's some like you know, like some uh, well like you know, some uh, like some sort of you know, like uh, you know, like a montage of him like you know, kind of like training in his new environment. And I don't know, like there's some like heartwarming moments and some like you know, some really fun, like action scenes and like some like you know, some funny moments. Um, but yeah, I don't know much about the story to be honest. Um, but I thought it looked really fun. Yeah. I'm just from a movie from the trailer. So from what I can gather, it should be. But you should see it just to see if it's if it's good. Yeah.

i’m hoping a voice as realistic as this becomes a local app soon, but i’ve not found anything that’s nearly as natural sounding yet. (also, honorable mention to chatgpt’s “sky.” she pronounces mandarin with a funnily american accent, but it sounds natural and not as robotic as the open-source alternatives i’ve tried)

the good thing is that you can tell it to be more concise, less bot-like, not so apologetic, etc., and it’ll trim down its responses for as long as it can “remember” (whatever the token limit is on persistence). it’ll be great when llms have, by default, a bit of persistent memory to remember things like this

to your second point, reddit tolerates these kind of rants/events because drama creates traffic, and, amusingly, people are giving that post awards.. which is money straight into reddit’s pocket.