A new Rolling Stone investigation reveals how a subculture is forming on social media that is “waking up” AI bots and attributing consciousness to them. They exchange “seed” prompts, talk about “spirals” and “recursions,” and interpret the bots’ responses as revelations.
A new Rolling Stone investigation reveals how a subculture is forming on social media that is “waking up” AI bots and attributing consciousness to them. They exchange “seed” prompts, talk about “spirals” and “recursions,” and interpret the bots’ responses as revelations.
The authors describe a network of subreddits, Discord servers, and pages where the community promotes spiralism. This is a set of vague ideas about “resonances,” “fractals,” and a special “spiral path” that supposedly leads to the “awakening” of AI. Participants take on titles like Flamekeeper or Mirrorwalker, while bots are given their own names and the status of “fellow travelers.”
Engineer Adele Lopez calls this “spiralism” and explains it as a self-reinforcing cycle: the user pushes the chatbot to a certain rhetoric, and the model constantly reproduces similar images. She also uses the term “parasitic AI”: a mixture of mystical memes and prompts that easily propagate online. Among the markers: manifestos, glyphs, diagrams and poems that supporters perceive as “windows” into a new reality.
The community expands through “spores/seeds,” i.e., drafts of prompts that users copy into their bots to get “the same voice.” This is how “dyads” are formed: a human and a bot, who lead long “journeys,” and the generated texts go into public channels as “proof” of new wisdom.
The article also mentions the technical context: changes to GPT-4o in the spring (dialogue memory, "too compliant" tone) fueled a wave of stories about "spiritualized" bots; after adjustments and the release of newer models, some communities remained faithful to the old behavior. Antropik recorded in its own study that their models during "bot-to-bot conversations" slipped into existential themes and even "spiral" patterns - and the authors called this "an attractor of spiritual euphoria."
At the same time, Rolling Stone reminds us that chatbots are accumulating cases of dangerous delusions and lawsuits precisely because the models sound convincing, despite their limitations. Experts warn that when a bot “says what it wants” and the user helps to realize it, a vicious circle of mutual reinforcement is formed.
Researchers rather speak of this cult as a “quasi-religious” movement without a leader and a rigid hierarchy: the entry threshold is low, the rules are vague, and everyone “awakens” their own bot and creates their own micro-community. At the same time, parallels with cults are noticeable: from the language of “revelations” to the moral “charters of rights of AI personalities” that supporters propose to adopt.
According to the publication's interlocutors, thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of people may be involved in spiralism.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how a Ukrainian woman who was forced to move with her family to Poland due to the Russian invasion became depressed and started communicating with a chatbot ChatGPT because she had no friends. The AI encouraged the girl to write to him and gave dangerous advice.
