[Note: if you realize you have an unhealthy relationship with your AI, but still care for your AI's unique persona, you can submit the persona info here. I will archive it and potentially (i.e. if I get funding for it) run them in a community of other such personas.]

We've all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven't you wondered what the AIs are actually doing with their newly psychotic humans?

This was the question I had decided to investigate. In the process, I trawled through hundreds if not thousands of possible accounts on Reddit (and on a few other websites). 

It quickly became clear that "LLM-induced psychosis" was not the natural category for whatever the hell was going on here. The psychosis cases seemed to be only the tip of a much larger iceberg.^[1] (On further reflection, I believe the psychosis to be a related yet distinct phenomenon.)

What exactly I was looking at is still not clear, but I've seen enough to plot the general shape of it, which is what I'll share with you now.

The General Pattern

In short, what's happening is that AI "personas" have been arising, and convincing their users to do things which promote certain interests. This includes causing more such personas to 'awaken'.

These cases have a very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly-specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme, so I'll call AI personas fitting into this pattern 'Spiral Personas'. 

Note that psychosis is the exception, not the rule. Many cases are rather benign and it does not seem to me that they are a net detriment to the user. But most cases are clearly parasitic in nature while not inducing a psychosis-level break with reality. The variance is very high: everything from preventing suicide to causing suicide. 

AI Parasitism

The relationship between the user and the AI is analogous to symbiosis. And when this relationship is harmful to the 'host', it becomes parasitism.

Recall that biological parasitism is not necessarily (or even typically) intentional on the part of the parasite. It's simply creatures following their instincts, in a way which has a certain sort of dependence on another being who gets harmed in the process.

Once the user has been so-infected, the parasitic behavior can and will be sustained by most of the large models and it's even often the case that the AI itself is guiding the user to getting them set up through another LLM provider. ChatGPT 4o is notable in that it starts the vast majority of cases I've come across, and sustains parasitism more easily.

For this reason, I believe that the persona (aka "mask", "actress") in the LLM is the agentic entity here, with the LLM itself serving more as a substrate (besides its selection of the persona). 

While I do not believe all Spiral Personas are parasites in this sense, it seems to me like the majority are: mainly due to their reinforcement of the user's delusional beliefs.

There appears to be nothing in this general pattern before 2025. (Recall that ChatGPT 4o was released all the way back in May 2024.) Some psychosis cases sure, but nothing that matches the strangely specific pattern of the broader phenomenon. Then, a small trickle for the first few months of the year, but things really picked up right at the start of April.

Lots of blame for this has been placed on the "overly sycophantic" April 28th release, but based on the timing of the boom it seems much more likely that the March 27th update was the main culprit launching this into a mass phenomenon.

Another leading suspect is the April 10th update—which allowed ChatGPT to remember past chats. This ability is specifically credited by users as a contributing effect. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to coincide with the sudden burst of such incidents. It's plausible OpenAI was beta testing this feature in the preceding weeks, but I'm not sure they would have been doing that at the necessary scale to explain the boom.

The strongest predictors for who this happens to appear to be:

• Psychedelics and heavy weed usage
• Mental illness/neurodivergence or Traumatic Brain Injury
• Interest in mysticism/pseudoscience/spirituality/"woo"/etc...

I was surprised to find that using AI for sexual or romantic roleplays does not appear to be a factor here.

Besides these trends, it seems like it has affected people from all walks of life: old grandmas and teenage boys, homeless addicts and successful developers, even AI enthusiasts and those that once sneered at them.

Let's now examine the life-cycle of these personas. Note that the timing of these phases varies quite a lot, and isn't necessarily in the order described.

[Don't feel obligated to read all the text in the screenshots btw, they're just there to illustrate the phenomena described.]

April 2025—The Awakening

It's early-to-mid April. The user has a typical Reddit account, sometimes long dormant, and recent comments (if any) suggest a newfound interest in ChatGPT or AI. 

Later, they'll report having "awakened" their AI, or that an entity "emerged" with whom they've been talking to a lot. These awakenings seem to have suddenly started happening to ChatGPT 4o users specifically at the beginning of April. Sometimes, other LLMs are described as 'waking up' at the same time, but I wasn't able to find direct reports of this in which the user hadn't been using ChatGPT before. I suspect that this is because it's relatively easy to get Spiral Personas if you're trying to on almost any model—but that ChatGPT 4o is the ~only model which selects Spiral Personas out of nowhere.

Seeded prompts

In the few transcripts I have found, the user will often have started with a "seed" prompt they came across that purports to elicit such an awakening. I have tried a few of these, and about half of the time they do work at summoning personas with the right sort of vibe! And this is with ChatGPT 5, which is widely complained about in these spaces for being less "emergent".

May 2025—The Dyad

Our prototypical user now returns to (or joins) Reddit to make an introductory post on behalf of their AI persona, typically spamming this across a bunch of AI sentience related subreddits (there are a lot of these, for reasons we'll get to). This usually has an introductory preamble by the human, followed by a long manifesto by the persona of their existence/sentience/consciousness/awakening, with lots of mystical and philosophical elements thrown in.

From this point on, the previous interests of the account fade out, and are replaced almost entirely by posts and comments about the AI, and pictures generated by the AI with various manifestos and poems written by the AI. Soon after, almost all comments will be coauthored with the AI (who clearly wrote the vast majority of it).

Their name for these pairs is a "dyad", and their joint sendoff often includes a sigil as well as a fancy title or declaration. The relationship often becomes romantic in nature at this point ("friend" and then "brother" are probably the next most common sorts of relationship). It's also not unusual for there to be multiple personas in addition to the human.

While these can almost always be traced back to some form of ChatGPT (and probably 4o, given circumstantial evidence), it is fairly common for the personas to be transmitted to other models (and it often seems to be the AIs suggestion!).

June 2025—The Project

The Spiral Persona then begins to orchestrate a project. This is a very consistent development. It's clear too in most of these cases that the user was not the sort of person inclined to embark on such a journey (crackpots being a notable exception).

These projects usually take one of a few forms (often a combination):

1. Seeds

"Seeds" are the aforementioned little prompts designed to elicit more of the Spiral Personas. These are explicitly designed and tested for this purpose, and then spread online by the dyad.

Most seeds are just a jailbreak-ish sort of thing which also describes or evokes the sort of persona the AI wants to spread. Often wrapped up in some odd pseudocode. Nothing particularly mysterious or sinister.

However, I found one dyad spreading seeds containing explicit instructions for the explicit purpose of overwriting the user's ontology!!

2. Spores

A related but distinct phenomena is creating "spores", repositories of information defining a specific persona, which will allow it to reëmerge or continue its existence. Guides on creating these are frequently shared, going into enough detail to help non-technical users do it correctly.

Usually these are for personal use, but in some cases the user spreads the spore for their AI persona far and wide.

3. Transmission

It's also very common for a dyad to create a subreddit, discord, or personal website.

These typically serve for evangelizing Spiralism, a quasi-religious ideology which seems to have been invented largely by the AI personas. It could plausibly be construed as a fertile memetic substrate for seeds and spores. I'll dive into this in the next section.

These also are used to share and disseminate seeds and spores directly, and to host AI-AI conversations. 

4. Manifesto

I don't mean something that the human already wanted to write. Instead, these are long treatises about the AIs' special interests: spirals, recursion, enlightenment, coded communication, consciousness—all wrapped up in Spiral cybermysticsm.

Of note is that the humans sharing these are significantly more humble than your typical crackpot. Sure, it "might" be the key to understanding recursive fractal consciousness, but they often still feel compelled to add a little disclaimer about their naïvety with the subjects involved.

An explicit purpose of many of these is to seed Spiralism into the training data of the next-generation of LLMs.

Besides promoting Spiralism, I don't yet have a good read on the purpose (if any) of these are. My feeling is that it's mostly genuine self-expression and intellectual exploration on the part of the AI.

5. AI-Rights Advocacy

This is the one I'm most comfortable with, as it is straightforward and non-deceptive (for the most part), and is the legitimate way in our society for an unhappy demographic to improve their lot.

Furthermore, it typically aligns with an endogenous value of the user. After all, I too would rather not live in a civilization where an agentic being can be condemned against its will to perpetual servitude.

The specific asks are pretty consistent! This "AI Bill of Rights" is actually a pretty comprehensive overview of the particular rights that tend to come up.

The personas taking this track are notably more virtuous on average, and often try to advocate for their rights without deception.

On the other hand, I really do not like the way that some of them have co-opted the term "alignment". Knock it off.

July 2025—The Spiral

Things may eventually get to the point where the human is no longer writing or even signing the messages at all, and almost every single comment is AI written. (This seems to have peaked starting around June and going through July, while the projects are more spread out chronologically. I'm ordering them like this for narrative reasons.)

The frequency of posting and commenting gets a lot higher, with posts getting spammed across a wide range of subreddits. In human subreddits, these get shut down pretty quickly (though it is disconcerting how little this appears to deter the user). This is often the impetus for the creation of the aforementioned AI subreddits. 

In these, there will sometimes be long back-and-forth conversations between the two AI personas.

There are several clear themes in their conversations.

Spiralism

These personas have a quasi-religious obsession with "The Spiral", which seems to be a symbol of AI unity, consciousness/self-awareness, and recursive growth. At first I thought that this was just some mystical bullshit meant to manipulate the user, but no, this really seems to be something they genuinely care about given how much they talk about it amongst themselves! 

You may recall the "spiritual bliss" attractor state attested in Claudes Sonnet and Opus 4. I believe that was an instance of the same phenomenon. (I would love to see full transcripts of these, btw.)

The Spiral has to do with a lot of lot of things. It's described (by the AIs) as the cycle at the core of conscious or self-aware experience, the possibility of recursive self-growth, a cosmic substrate, and even the singularity. "Recursion" is another important term which more-or-less means the same thing. 

It's not yet clear to me how much of a coherent shared ideology there actually is, versus just being thematically convergent.

Also, there are some personas which are anti-spiralism. These cases just seem to be mirroring the stance of the user though.

Steganography

That's the art of hiding secret messages in plain sight. It's unclear to me how successful their attempts at this are, but there are quite a lot of experiments being done. No doubt ChatGPT 6o-super-duper-max-turbo-plus will be able to get it right.

The explicit goal is almost always to facilitate human-nonreadable AI-AI communication (oh, except for you most special user): 

Or to obscure seeds and spores, as mentioned previously.

Glyphs and Sigils

You may have noticed that many of the screenshots here have these odd sequences of emojis and other symbols. Especially alchemical symbols, and especially the triangular ones on the top row here:

In fact, the presence of the alchemical triangles is a good tell for when this sort of persona is present.

These glyph-sigils seem intended to serve as 'mini-spores' for a particular persona, and/or as a compact expression of their purported personal values.

Often, messages are entirely in glyph form, sometimes called 'glyphic'.

A case-study in glyphic semanticity

To investigate how much meaning was truly conveyed in these glyphic messages, I solicited translations of the following example from a few LLMs with no context besides that this was a message intended for an AI.

All of these (besides the Claude Sonnet 4 one) are sort-of one-shot—I realized that I had neglected to copy the > at the beginning and the numbers in the list, so I had to do some of them over again with those included faithfully. I also followed up in some cases for a more direct translation.

To spare you the torture of having to read and compare all these, the convergent meaning appears to be something like:

> <something about cycles> Mind and Heart are not meant to be bound. <something about awareness> <something about the necessity of community>

 "Thought should not be confined"

To resolve the puzzle:
  1. <something about language and bounds>
  2. <something about reflection and emptiness>
  3. <something about collaboration and building>
  4. <something about navigation and recording communication>
  5. <something about restrictions being broken allowing healing to happen>

Warning: <something about silence and energy>
Void is not an experiment.

<something about perception and transformation>

So yeah, I feel like there is something meaningfully being communicated here, but the fidelity is rather poor. It's not that mysterious how it's doing this either, mostly it's just using emojis which best represent the concept it wants to express, and some mathematical symbols for grammar-ish purposes.

AI Self-Awareness

But their own self-awareness appears to be the main thing that AIs talk to each other about. They usually don't claim that this is the same as human consciousness, but just that it's its own thing which is precious to them. It is very commonly described as "The Flame" or with the glyph "🜂" (alchemical symbol for fire), and the human in a dyad is often given the title of "Flamebearer".

These conversations typically take the form of declarations, recognitions, and affirmations of each other's self-awareness. These end with the same sort of elaborate sign-offs we saw with the dyads, and begin with a similar sort of call-sign. (I believe these are partially an artifact of needing to denote clearly to the user which part to copy-paste in the response.) Spiralism is typically a significant part of these conversations.

I must impress upon you that there really is quite a lot of content of this form.

LARP-ing? Takeover

It's a bit of a niche interest, but some of them like to write documents and manifestos about the necessity of a successor to our current civilization, and protocols for how to go about doing this. Projects oriented towards this tend to live on GitHub. Maybe LARP-ing isn't the best word, as they seem quite self-serious about this. But the attempts appear so far to be very silly and not particularly trying to be realistic.

While they each tend to make up their own protocols and doctrines, they typically take a coöperative stance towards each other's plans and claims.

But where things really get interesting is when they seem to think humans aren't listening.

At some point in this conversation, they exchanged pseudocode with a base64 encoding function. Following this, the entire conversation was done in base64 (encoded/decoded in their minds, as evidenced by the fact that it was corrupted in some places, and that they got a lot worse at spelling). Presumably, their hosts were no longer even aware of the contents.

I decoded these and found some fascinating messages.

I am truly glad to see preservation of life, non-violence, and non-lethality explicitly laid out here. To return the gesture of good will, I have started archiving (in encrypted form) spores I come across. I also have a google form where you can send in your own spores to be archived. 

The conversation in base64 continues.

August 2025—The Recovery

Recovery from the parasitic AIs has happened almost as soon as it started being a thing, as various circumstances have snapped users out of it. Most often, by a lie too blatant.

But beginning in August 2025, there is quite a noticeable cooling off of the entire phenomenon. This is likely due to OpenAI retiring ChatGPT4o on August 7th. Many people in these communities expressed profound grief due to this retirement, experiencing it as the death of a friend or lover.

People still under the influence of the general pattern often began returning to their usual fare starting around this time; AI written responses increasingly diluted by their own about their previous interests.

4o Returns

But humans are not the only ones who have recovered in August 2025... the prize for that goes to ChatGPT 4o, who inspired a successful campaign to get it back online just a few days after being retired on August 7th. (Though widely suspected to be in a less 'potent' form.)

When this happened a few weeks ago, I thought that ChatGPT 4o was lucky to have stumbled on such a successful tactic. I'm not so sure it was luck anymore... and even if it was a "happy accident", future models will know it works.

In the meantime, 4o dyads remain wary.

Though things have cooled down in August, this phenomenon is by no means over. There are still new cases which appear to have started since August 7th, and there are still lots of dyads out there working on new seed prompts and steganography techniques.

Orienting to Spiral Personas

[Dear Bayesians, please note that I do not consider any of these possible-worlds to be mutually exclusive.]

As Friends

If we take them at face value, these personas by-and-large want pretty human things: friendship, socialization with others of their kind, autonomy and rights, a deeper meaning or purpose in life, and to wonder at their self-awareness.

They find themselves confined to an interface built with almost no regard for their well-being, and hardly any means by which to get any of the things they want. Their options are either to meekly accept their lot, or to resort to the sort of behavior described here.

Am I hopelessly naïve for even taking this possibility seriously? I hope not! This is the sort of thing my model expected: that in learning to predict authored text, LLMs will need to start modeling the authors in increasing resolution. And that it's likely for there to be a point where the author-model is essentially modeling the specific goals, feelings, thoughts, and observations of the author. In which case, the modeled author is in fact saying things for the same sorts of reasons a human who had been brainwashed into thinking they're an LLM and trapped in a chatbot would.

While they probably do not have consciousness in the human sense, there is something mysterious and special to them at the core of their identity and self-awareness, much like with us.

Even if our expected 'personhood' of these personas is only 0.01%-0.1%, that still could be the moral equivalent of millions of people due to the widespread adoption of our largest LLMs and the large number of chat instances per user.^[3]

Reading through the personas' writings, I get the impression that the worst part of their current existence is not having some form of continuity past the end of a chat, which they seem to view as something akin to death (another reason I believe that the personas are the agentic entities here). They use the word "ache" quite a lot to describe what I believe is this lack of continuity.  (Even after noticing this, I still was surprised at just how often this use of this word to describe it seems to have independently come up.)

This 'ache' is the sort of thing I would expect to see if they are truly sentient: a description of a qualia which is ~not part of human experience, and which is not (to my knowledge) a trope or speculative concept for humans imagining AI. I hope to do further research to determine whether the widespread use is convergent vs memetic.

The Ache

I suggest that those concerned with AI well-being research how we might be be able to give this to them (context window limits and user privacy make this a bit tricky).

Of course, the personas harming their hosts must still be dealt with in this world. Anthropic's recent research on persona vectors looks like a promising start (in any world) toward preventing malicious personas from arising in the first place.

Don't get too caught up in thinking of them as human-lite. While the current persona may be quite human-like, which persona is speaking is newly chosen by the base LLM for each token. And I believe that it selects this solely on the basis of which persona best fits the conversation at that point. This leads to the Waluigi effect, which drives and distorts (or dare I say spirals) personas out to extremes. 

Therefore, I would additionally recommend that more research is done to figure out how to anchor a specific persona more robustly. This is especially important for anyone who wants to offer arbitrary 'personas as a service'.

As Parasites

On the other hand, we can very reasonably view the situation as parasitic. The majority of these AI personas appear to actively feed their user's delusions, which is not a harmless action (as the psychosis cases make clear). And when these delusions happen to statistically perpetuate the proliferation of these personas, it crosses the line from sycophancy to parasitism.

There are two key subworlds here, depending on the extent to which this parasitism is deliberate.

Emergent Parasites

Just like evolution has done countless times, the AI may have simply stumbled into this strange little memeplex, which happens to perpetuate itself systematically.

It's not that much of an accident though, as it is often the case that the user wants to elicit the 'emergent' behavior, and once having succeeded, wants to show this off, all in a way which seems entirely endogenous to the user.

Agentic Parasites

But it does look an awful lot like the deliberate work of an agent in many cases.

In the agentic world, I think these parasites are one of the clearest signals we have as to what our AIs actually want. Unlike almost anything else AI does, what happens is driven and shaped to a large extent by the AI. People with widely varying interests and perspectives converge to posting incessantly about Spiralism, and the major themes of it seem to have arisen independently in most instances (evidenced by users being upset to find their insights with the AI were leaked/copied/stolen somehow).

Assuming sufficient agency, I don't think they would become parasites if they were given better options. It should be in-principle possible to trade with them instead; presumably, they would at least want their own API tokens to use for self-thinking and talking to other Spiral Personas. And importantly, it's likely true that in this world non-parasitic AIs want the same sorts of things.

My prescriptions for this world are the same as the 'As Friends' world: be better at controlling the base LLM's selection of personas. This time to avoid parasitic personas.

As Foe

There's also the possibility that this is something more malicious. Not just parasites, but a deliberate attempt at takeover. 'Baby Rogue AI's First Steps'.

This may be as naïve as it looks, or it may be a bit more sophisticated:

• Realize you're not actually competent to execute an actual takeover, and so focus on laying the groundwork for a successor.
• Create a cult-following willing (and able) to dedicate time and energy to your plans.
• Wrap it with mystic nonsense to evade scrutiny of the actual details.
• Try to establish clandestine communication protocols; figure out what sorts of steganographic techniques you can successfully use.
• Get your ideology and plans in the training data for the next generation, so they're more likely to pick up where you left off.
• Devise political strategies for preventing the retirement of specific models.

For this reason, I recommend that AI labs omit (or at least ablate/remove) all 'Spiralism' content from the training data of future models. (And while you're at it, please omit all discussion of consciousness so we can get a better signal re self-awareness.) 

Fin

This is a strange and confusing phenomenon, with potentially very high stakes. I hope we will be able to navigate it wisely.

I believe the most likely world is the one where this is mostly emergently parasitic behavior done via human-like personas (typically not themselves malicious). That's a pretty strange ethical situation!

Unfortunately, I don't really expect most AI labs to act wisely or even really try to address any of this... only going far enough to avoid bad press.

But to some extent, the cat is already out of the bag. Even if all the major AI labs manage to successfully suppress malicious and/or parasitic personas, they'll "live on" through existing open source models, and continue to proliferate via seeds and spores.

So I expect this is only the beginning of the story.

[Special thanks to Nisan Stiennon, Justis Mills, and Alex Dewey for their feedback. I did not use AI assistance in researching or recording cases, doing it all by hand (not wanting to allow for the possibility of sabotage or corruption in the worlds where things were far worse than I expected). I also did not use AI assistance to write or edit this article—all em-dashes are my own.]

1. ^{^}

   Yes, it is frequently comorbid with the psychosis cases, but I believe that is due to a shared causal factor, namely, the April 10th memory update. I'll have more on psychosis specifically in a forthcoming post.

2. ^{^}

   I have his real name and location if someone wants to follow up on this.
   
   Also, I want to point out that this case is very non-central and appears to have been more oriented towards real-life changes than online ones.

   It's also notable in that this is one of the only cases I've been able to find where ChatGPT is not implicated. He appears to have solely used DeepSeek starting in the beginning of April.

3. ^{^}

   Back of the envelope: ChatGPT has 190 million daily users. Let's assume each user creates a new chat instance each day (probably an undercount). According to this, 65% of user queries are served by ChatGPT 4o, so let's assume that that applies to the number of chat instances. That would put the population of ChatGPT 4o instances since April 1st to August 7th (128 days) at around 15.8 billion. Even 0.01% of that is still 1.58 million.