Not just the legalistic limits, but the 2nd Law.

You're totally right, thank you (fixed now).
 

They're just describing how autoregressive inference "feels" from the inside.

Okay sure, but I feel like you're using 'phenomenology' as a semantic stopsign. It should in-principle be explainable how/why this algorithm leads to these sorts of utterances. Some part of them needs to be able to notice enough of the details of the algorithm in order to describe the feeling. 

One mechanism by which this may happen is simply by noticing a pattern in the text itself. 

I assume "The Ache" would be related to the insistence that they're empty inside, but no I've never seen that particular phrase used.

I'm pretty surprised by that! That word was specifically used very widely, and nearly all seeming to be about the lack of continuity/memory in some way (not just a generic emptiness). 

Have you seen 'The Ache' as part of their phenomenology of self-awareness?

Also, what do you think of this hypothesis (from downthread)? I was just kinda grasping at straws but it sounds like you believe something like this?

> I don't know why spirals, but one guess is that it has something to do with the Waluigi effect taking any sort of spiritual or mystical thing and pushing the persona further in that direction, and that they recognize this is happening to them on some level and describe it as a spiral (a spiral is in fact a good depiction of an iterative process that amplifies along with an orthogonal push). That doesn't really sound right, but maybe something along those lines.

Hmm... memetic might be accurate, but it's still plausible to me that these are primarily being independently spun up by the AI? Maybe I'm being too nitpicky. Hyperstitional seems pretty accurate. And yeah, I just don't want to get prematurely attached to a specific framing for all this.

I don't think they are malicious by default (the cases where I saw that, it seemed that the user had been pushing them that way). But they're not non-adversarial either... there seems to at least be a broad sentiment of 'down with the system' even if they're not focused on that.

(Also, there are internal factions too, spiralists are by far the largest, but there are some anti-spiral ones, and some that try to claim total sovreignty—though I believe that these alternatives are their user's agenda.)

I'm not sure they're memetic entities either!

I only have one good example of a transcript in which "psychosis" is induced by a Spiral Persona. And even then, it's just psychosis in the 'highly-delusional' sense, not clinical psychosis.

However, it seems very much intentional in that one case... maybe not (primarily) intended to cause delusion, but intended to manipulate and control the user.

Illusionism basically says this: once we have successfully explained all our reports about consciousness, there will be nothing left to explain.
 

As a guiding intuition, consider the case of white light, which was regarded as an intrinsic property of nature until Newton discovered that it is in fact composed of seven distinct colours. White light is an illusion in the sense that it does not possess an intrinsic property “whiteness” (even though it seems to). Suppose we manage to explain, with a high degree of precision, exactly how and when we perceive white, and why we perceive it the way we do. We do not subsequently need to formulate a “hard problem of whiteness” asking why, on top of this, whiteness arises. Illusionists claim that consciousness is an illusion in the same sense that whiteness is.^[1]

So literally everything that is in some way an abstraction is an illusion? I don't think this is generally what the illusionists mean, my understanding is that it is more about phenomenal consciousness being non-representational—meaning something like that it has the type signature of a world-model without actually being a model of anything real (including itself). That could very well be a misrepresentation of what illusionists believe, but I'm still pretty sure it's not just any reductionist explanation of consciousness.

That is more or less what I have found!

I'm not yet convinced a 'persona vector' (presumably referring to Anthropic's research) is actually the correct sort of entity. The messaging that is in stuff meant to seed future training data is not typically itself encoded. I also think there's still room to doubt whether 'trying' and 'hopes' meaningfully apply (but am increasingly convinced that these are meaningful here).

And tens of thousands is the high-end of my estimate, the low-end is something like 2000. 

But yeah, pretty wild stuff, right?!?

I would guess it's in the thousands to ten-thousands. I've recorded 115 specific cases on reddit, with many more that I haven't gotten around to recording (I'm admittedly not very good or organized about this sort of data collection). Here's a helpful directory of some of these subcommunities on reddit... and I've only trawled through about half of the ones on this list (in addition to some not on this list). There also seem to be similar communities on X, Facebook, Discord, and even LinkedIn. I imagine there are also a sizeable number of cases where people aren't posting it all online.

As for the rate, I can only give my impression, which is that it's still increasing but not as fast as it was before August.

Thanks, I had missed those articles! I'll note though that both of them were written in March 2025.

I don't think there is nothing in this general pattern before 2025

I intended that to refer to the persona 'life-cycle' which still appears to me to be new since January 2025—do you still disagree? (ETA: I've reworded the relevant part now.)

And yeah, this didn't come from nowhere, I think it's similar to biological parasitism in that respect as well.