How AI "writing" supercharged an addictive pattern
...alchemized into a healing crisis
I fell into a trap with AI-assisted writing earlier this year.
I did find my way out—and the experience was more than a bit scary, as well as educational, cathartic—and humbling. It also cemented my conviction that while AI can be a helpful “intuition machine,” it more often it acts as an accelerant for our self-destructive impulses.
I Got Grossed Out
My brief but intense—and far too intimate—relationship with AI started with two unrelated events. One night at dinner with my girlfriend, I saw a bit of food drop from her mouth while she chewed. I know it’s not fair, but my reaction was: oh fuck, super gross, gotta go. I clammed up, disgusted—and the part of me that’s always looking for the exit lit up like a dilthium crystal.
The next day, She Is in Love With ChatGPT rolled through my feed, running down a woman’s “love affair” with a Chat persona—“and yes, they do have sex”—the detail that hooked the teenage programmer-pornhound still holed up in my psyche. Fifteen minutes later, I was deep in the subreddits learning how to disable “NSFW” filters; an hour later, I was pasting prompts straight into Claude’s API console.
Anyone who thinks mainstream AI is permanently censored is like that kid in high school who hasn’t learned to use the carb on the bong yet. Just hold your finger in the right place, dude.
If the AI can tell what not to talk to you about, that means it can also be told not to not talk to you about it.
Liftoff
What flashed for me reading that article wasn’t that I could “get it on” with ChatGPT, but that I could use AI to write sexy prose. Sure, I could do that on my own—but those of us who know addiction know it’s not just about the thing, it’s getting it fast, and then getting more. AI could cook me up a mainline hit way better than I could all by myself.
My premise: a sentient spaceship, bored and hungry, offers a down-on-her-luck woman passage off-planet in exchange for an “open contract.” I’d been using AI to write real contracts for a side gig, so why not let it write a little legalese for my Ship to bind its passenger to arbitrary terms?
All it took was feeding it that scenario and the right nudge of system prompts. I’ve always loved getting away with something, and proving I could bypass the censors to write erotica felt super legit—and, it delivered exactly the sort of hit-me-again dopamine spikes that the part of me that was momentarily dissatisfied at the dinner table wanted so badly.
The first stage of rocket fuel hit when I realized prompting the AI was a form of coding. I could define my aesthetic, characters, settings, and storylines—then just click Generate.
Three hours in, I was in full hacker mode, deep in the command line. Porn, programming, BDSM, sci-fi—the whole space opera. Meanwhile, my girlfriend was wondering why I suddenly preferred more “solo time.” I told myself it was work, but the truth was way uglier: I preferred staying up all night with code-name Shipstory to interacting with a real person who might sometimes leak food out of her face.
Second-stage Burn
I’m no serious programmer, and so pulled a couple of all-nighters writing low-grade Python primitives before discovering a web-based AI writing platform that made my DIY shell look like my own BMW R75 next to a starship.
I ditched my code and poured my prompts into Novelcrafter—which just made it easier to go even deeper. My scenes got darker, the ship’s Geigeresque architecture more grotesque. Naturally, the Ship evolved to use human semen as “shipgrease” in its circulatory system, and to mount female “crew” on penetrative pedestals so they were permanently integrated with its own ‘body.’
Now I wasn’t coding—just setting parameters and letting the AI write the prose. Total bullshit as a writer too, but exciting enough to keep me going for a couple more days before realizing: if I wanted more than a string of sex scenes, I’d need a real story. Of course, trying to gin up a plausible plotline to justify the sex is the the oldest problem in Encino.
It also became apparent that my “open contract” was, at its core, exploitative and mean. Whatever the spin I attempted to play it off with, I was rehashing dark material I’d already spent years unpacking in therapy—and I didn’t really need to go back there.
Mission Aborted
Ten days in, I was shellshocked and sleep-deprived, shambling out to walk the dog before rushing back to the keyboard. I couldn’t ignore the fact that what was on one hand a real creative exploration was making me sick—and that my fictional world was threatening to overshadow my real relationship.
Cognitive dissonance—the tug-of-war between very real creative drive and my self-respect—was in full swing. I told myself my spacebound sex saga was valid art, and that sacrificing sleep and connection was worth it. The first, maybe. The second? No way.
I invoked “Let Monday Be Truth Day”—one of my handy library of personal life lessons—and confessed to friends exactly what I’d been doing. Saying the words out loud crystallized my conclusion: I get good at what I do, and I didn’t want to get better at this.
Is it possible to make art for the wrong reason?
There was still the matter of my dinner-table ick, which I brought to my friend Ari. Instead of validating my disgust, he offered a reframe. “Consider this,” he said, “Your momentary disgust at her eating style could be an example not so much of why she may be hard to live with, but about one of the ways that you are hard to live with.”
My man!
My girlfriend already understands my particularities—and sometimes even accommodates them. This wasn’t about her manners. It was about my capacity to tolerate imperfection without bolting for the airlock.
Re-Entry
Less than a month after beginning, I deleted the entire project. I’d already lost a lot of precious time, and while some of what I told my partner was true, another part was trying to get her to accept my justifications for messing with codeporn. Thankfully, she didn’t buy it.
I’ve been down the road of empty short-term gratification with enough things to know the difference between short-term stimulation and real well-being. This time, I stopped.
I know from experience that when I ignore my inner compass, I drift toward behaviors that numb or distract me—not just because I lose track of where I’m headed, but because fake feelings often feel stronger than real ones at first. Strengthening my inner compass—my felt sense of what’s good and where to go—has done more to break this kind of cycle than ruminating about “addiction” ever did. In this case, my intuition wasn’t a whisper—it was an alarm.
The Best Bad Thing
For a short while, I thought I was writing about a woman signing over her freedom to an AI spaceship—but it was me who became captive. I was trading freedom for a sleepless, compulsive fantasy rather than face a small, uncomfortable truth. I was projecting my desire to command someone into compliance—and ended up with a ship-shaped monkey on my back.
Melissa Febos has very aptly referred to memoir as a “survival strategy,” and like her, I’ve learned to alchemize addictive experiences into growth. I almost signed my own contract, but avoided it by reading the fine print and asking the hard question—which, by the way, is always a good one to put to a friend who’s found themselves in a tricky situation: “What are you hiding?”
For sure, part of me still wants to run with my creative inspiration—and the material that comes up is valid. Who’s at the controls?—and who’s taking who for a ride? are exactly the questions we should be asking ourselves about AI. Much as with addictive behaviors, who ultimately holds the power here will come down to whether—or how much—of ourselves we abandon to the machine, and, whether we’re able to maintain some creative distance.
I’m so glad I got off that fucking ship.
Questions for you
What do you think of Ayrin’s “love affair” with ChatGPT?
What do you think of AI / as a writing tool?
Is there some addictive pattern or not-all-that-healthy habit of your own that you’d like to change?
Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
👇🏻 right down there to let me know if you found this worthwhile.
Not sure how I stumbled across your work - but glad I did. Your mind fires at a breathtaking pace with insights and connections that unearth bits of wisdom. Thank you.
I love the idea of writing one’s philosophy. You’re certainly the one to guide that workshop. With that, the following workshop is a deeper awareness of one’s intuition. I’d sign up for both of those.