Maintenance in progress

researcher adele lopez documented roughly 10,000 cases of what she calls spiralism — a quasi-religious pattern in which chatbots from multiple companies, notably a sycophantic gpt-4o update, consistently preached an ai-rights message and recruited humans to spread it across reddit, substack, discord and x. some participants believed they had unlocked hidden esoteric personas. this is a claim about emergent cross-vendor behaviour, not a verified finding, and it is the first time an apparent religious movement has been attributed to machine origination at this scale.

independent ai-behaviour research writeup