This is so wild that I choose to believe it's an elaborate bit
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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I've said it before but this case really exemplifies the point: these sorts of generators are like gacha machines, it's a dopamine gambling button that can get someone addicted quite easily. So you get people who literally don't actually care about what it's spitting out, they're not trying to use it to actually realize some idea they've had, they just want to slam the treat button over and over and keep feeling good forever even as it overstimulates and temporarily burns out their ability to feel pleasure.
Also I've seen image generator gooners literally call it a gacha themselves, completely aware of what they're doing with it and what it is.
Especially when, if you've use one, it can generate a whole bunch of trash that looks nothing like what you want, and it can take a while before you get something that looks presentable.
Intermittent reinforcement is a very effective conditioning technique.
Exactly. Compound that with the delay to build anticipation, the trivial ease of access (for a local generator it's literally just slapping a button, with a material power cost akin to playing a modern AAA game or a heavily modded older game like minecraft for an equivalent period of time), the heavy visual component (or audio, in the case of the image in the OP), and the tension of whether it'll be a "winner" that gives you dopamine or something disappointing that strings the tension along further.
And then on top of that you can customize it, and the prompt system is just perfect for developing superstitious ritual components as you try to tweak your prayers to the inscrutable machine to make it give treats better (some of which actually works, because it's an absurd real-world manifestation of like 40K machine spirits where asking them nicely really does make them work better or like the world-building book language in Myst where getting lost in describing endless trivial things in flowery language actually makes the rest work better too).
It's basically a perfect storm for building addictions and ingraining them.