@Ace-Starfield
People used to go weeks or months or years between seeing things that hit their specific dopamine triggers. Maybe a scene in a show, maybe a festival that only happened once a year. Imagine that fireworks were “your thing” - you’d have to wait for a fair or holiday that featured them, or become a pyromaniac. Or go into the fireworks industry.
But now you can replay that exact scene from a show on infinite repeat. Or have a machine generate that exact set of ‘things’ that seeing punches you straight in the Ventral Tegmental Area and your Hypothalamus that gives you a direct shot of dopamine every time.
It’s like the move “Brainstorm (1983)”. Guy invents a machine that records thoughts. But it also captures memories and the complete physical experience. One of the test subjects steals the recorder and records themselves having sex.
Later, the lab folks find the recording and one of the engineers steals the recording and sets it into an infinite loop of just the orgasm and plays it back at home.
He misses work for a week, his wife calls utterly panicked because she found him in their cottage looking like he was having a heart attack. So the main characters head out and they find him later in a chair, completely covered in cum (somehow edited out of this photo but in the movie he is completely drenched in sweat and other fluids), ejaculating ever few seconds, his body almost utterly wrecked.
Later in the movie, the main character visits this guy again in the hospital to try to understand why the machine he helped create works so much better than intended, and the orgasm guy is sitting in a wheel chair in the hospital.
“I’m … so much better.” He says. “You can’t understand how much more human I *HNNNNG* have become.” he says as he has another spontaneous orgams. I don’t remember the line but he basically says; “I am evolved.”
We now live in a future very much like that movie foretold. Any one of us can be that guy in the chair having an orgasm on infinite repeat.
The difference is that our bodies will hit a dopamine saturation, and you’ll need to hit a different switch to get the same high.
But - the point is - you no longer have to wait for something to randomly hit “your buttons”. You can now call up the exact moment, the exact fetish, the exact character in the exact situation doing the exact thing that causes your brain to say; “Yes. That’s the good stuff.”
Even if it’s Trixie sipping tea from a cup.
We live in that future, or a future like, what was foretold in that movie.
We can create things because they’re challenging, because they teach us things, because we are coping, because they are emotionally satisfying to do, for money, for friends, or simply because creating it punches us right smack in the *HNNNNG*.
I think most artists who draw a lot or creatives who create a lot are getting some sort of *HNNNNG* from their creation. Otherwise it’s hard to understand why humans would go through the effort of being creative. It’s not a simple amount of energy. It’s not evolutionarily beneficial. But we do it. Because *HNNNNG*.
Not all creativity is sexual. But wow have LLMs given SO MANY more people the capacity to create “that thing”, or something close enough to it. And then they can create “that thing” again and again and again and again until they are saturated and have to find another different “thing” to create.
And LLMs kind of reward the iterative process of dialing in the “thingness” of their generations. Reworking it slowly until you hit the button hard and precisely.
So, I don’t think it’s odd. But for me more often than not things I generate are a part of a process. I use it because I need to figure out the composition for a panel or a room (as much as I am able to trust the LLM’s concepts of physical continuity and perspective), or something for work as a layout or proposal, or I need a mockup to give to an artist as a ‘do it like this but in your style/hand’ thing.
But I have also generated things just because I was needing to cope, and holy cow you can end up with a thousand “I did this to cope” by the time you’re done, each one of which was a dopamine punch, almost all of which afterwards are hard to look at or even understand what was going on that I asked for it and then bothered to save it.
So - congratulations! You are generating things that give you that high. That’s a good thing. As my art professor used to say; “Make a hundred more.”
