LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman says generative AI is tapping into a powerful and healthy human drive: the joy of creating something new.
In a new interview with Dan Shipper, Hoffman says tools like Claude Code and other generative AI systems are giving people a new kind of tech addiction, one starkly different from the passive consumption of brain-rotting content.
Hoffman says AI lowers the barrier between idea and execution, triggering a creative realization many users experience for the first time.
“Like the dopamine hit is you succeed at creating… It suddenly goes, ‘Oh my God, I can create something interesting.’ It’s actually a healthy dopamine hit.”
He pushes back on the idea that this kind of pull should be viewed negatively. Reid says the negative framing around obsession misses how humans develop mastery and fulfillment.
“One of the things that’s weird about the word addiction is, you say, ‘Well, I’m addicted to breathing.’ Well, actually, in fact, that’s a good thing. So addiction has this kind of negative overlay. The fact that you get very committed to something, is it unhealthy for you? In the creation thing, in fact, it’s not unhealthy.”
Hoffman says that top generative AI users are now displaying a pattern of addiction, where they are committed to completing projects using prompt after prompt.
“I’m going a little bit more obsessive. I’m going like, I want to finish this, I want to make this, I’m gonna make this really great. That’s actually, in fact, part of where we explore our fuller potentials, our super agency if you will… I do think that it’s part of the generative AI revolution in ways that people go, we can do amazing things.
And so I think that that kind of creative addiction, creative commitment, creative exploration is, in fact, one of the really important things.”
Hoffman says users are discovering this not just through coding tools, but across AI systems more broadly.
“And I think people have been discovering it, not just with Claude Code. But also like learning through prompting these agents. It’s like, ‘Well, wait, I can make something here.’”
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