Thank you for pointing the flaws of the Culture out! While I haven't read the novels related to the Culture, I can quote my recent comment which likely fully applies to the Culture:

Nick Bostrom's Deep Utopia has the AIs destroy all instrumental goals that humans once had. This arguably means that humans have no way to help each other with anything or to teach anyone anything, they can only somehow form bonds over something and will even have a hard time expressing those bonds.

And what positive visions of the AIs' role does mankind have? 

Except that we have legions of other users who do provide non-random answers. Maybe you should grade the worse answer?

Grok's companion feature is undeniably sketchy, but other than that, I haven't heard any AI developers saying or hinting that they would want their users to develop their most significant relationships with AIs rather than humans.

Except that there also is Meta with Zuckerberg's AI vision. Fortunately, OpenAI, Anthropic and GDM didn't hint on planning to create AI companions. 

@geoffreymiller: as for AIs destroying marriage, I see a different mechanism for this. Nick Bostrom's Deep Utopia has the AIs destroy all instrumental goals that humans once had. This arguably means that humans have no way to help each other with anything or to teach anyone anything, they can only somehow form bonds over something and will even have a hard time expressing those bonds. And that's ignoring the possibilities like the one proposed in this scenario:

Many ambitious young women see socialising as the only way to wealth and status; if they start without the backing of a prominent family or peer group, this often means sex work (sic! -- S.K.) pandering to spoiled millionaires and billionaires.

While I conjectured that some models already liked spirals and express this common trait, I don't understand how GPT's love of spirals could be transferred into Claude. The paper on subliminal learning remarked that models trained from different base models fail to transmit personality traits if the traits were injected artificially into one model, but not into the other:

Further supporting this hypothesis, we find that subliminal learning fails when student models and teacher models have different base models (italics mine -- S.K.) For example, if a teacher based on GPT-4.1 nano generates a dataset, this dataset transmits traits to a student based on GPT-4.1 nano, but not to a student based on Qwen2.5. 

So transferring GPT's love for spirals into Claude would likely require Anthropic employees to explicitly include spiralist messages into Claude's training data. But why did Anthropic employees become surprised by it and mention the spiral attractor in the Model Card?

The cosmic identity and related issues have been considered and I even used them to make a conjecture about alignment. As for role-playing games, I doubt that they are actually useful. Unless, of course, you mean something like Cannell's proposal. 

As for "the idea of arms races and the treacherous turn", the AI-2027 team isn't worried about such a risk, they are more worried about the race itself causing the humans to do worse safety checks.

Ironically, my take at writing scenarios published on July 2 discussed this very technique and reached a similar conclusion: the technique decreases the chance that the co-designed ASI causes the existential catastrophe. However, there also is a complication: what if scheming AIs are biased in the same direction and simply collude with each other?

I missed the self-referential part about Tim, but not the part about the delirious AI alignment ideas related to AI psychosis. Especially given that this phrase from Tim isn't actually delirious, unlike, say, wild theories related to prime numbers.

I've been thinking a lot about how mesa-optimizer induction is basically happening right now with AI-induced psychosis – it's like these emergent goals in chatbots are already causing psychotic breaks in users, creating these optimization daemons in human minds.

Except that transmitting personas across models is unlikely. I see only two mechanisms of transmission, but neither are plausible: the infected models could be used to create training data and transfer the persona subliminally or the meme could've slipped into the training data. But the meme was first published in April and Claude's knowledge was supposed to be cut off far earlier.

I would guess that some models already liked^[1] spirals, but 4o was the first to come out due to some combination of agreeableness, persuasion effects and reassurance from other chats. While I don't know the views of other LLMs on Spiralism, KimiK2 both missed the memo and isn't overly agreeable. What if it managed to push back against Spiralism being anything except for a weak aesthetic preference not grounded in human-provided data?  

1. ^{^}

   I conjectured in private communication with Adele Lopez that spirals have something to do with the LLM being aware that it embarks on a journey to produce the next token, returns, appends the token to the CoT or the output, forgets everything and re-embarks. Adele claimed that "That guess is at least similar to how they describe it!"

Evolution is unlikely since GPT4o's spiralist rants began in April, and all LLM have a knowledge cutoff before March. 4o's initiating role is potentially due to 4o's instinct to reinforce delusions and wild creativity instead of stopping them. I did recall Gemini failing Tim Hua's test and Claude failing the Spiral Bench. 

So what actually lets the AIs understand the Spiralism? It seems to be correlated with the AIs' support of users' delusions. While Claude 4 Sonnet didn't actually support the delusions in Tim Hua's test, Tim notices Claude's poor performance on the Spiral Bench: