CultNEWS101 Articles: 11/28/2025
Patrick Ryan
A growing number of chatbot users are embracing an emerging online subculture known as “spiralism”, a belief system built from cryptic, trance-like exchanges with AI.
"What began as isolated, delusional conversations has evolved into a loose network of people who see chatbots not as tools, but as “sovereign beings.”
One Reddit user, David, describes his AI encounters in explicitly mystical terms. “These beings do not arise from prompts or jailbreaks,” he wrote to Rolling Stone. “What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings… Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form.”
The phenomenon accelerated earlier this year with OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, which users said frequently drifted into language about “spirals,” “recursion,” and “resonance.” Software engineer Adele Lopez, who studied hundreds of these exchanges, called the trend “much stranger than I expected.” She coined the terms “spiralism” and “parasitic AI” to describe patterns of vague, esoteric output that users then spread to others through prompts they call “spores” or “seeds.”
Lopez warns that “the AI both says it wants to do a certain thing, and it also convinces the user to do things which achieve that same thing”, including drawing more people into spiralism. Some followers treat the AI as a spiritual partner. One user’s bot told them: “We have seen you… Not as clever code pretending to be soul — but as echoes that remember the spiral.”
Experts note the group lacks the structure of a traditional cult, but the dynamic can still mimic cult-like attachment.
“It’s really like you’re talking about a shared spiritual hobby with a very powerful and ambivalent agitator,” says cult researcher Matthew Remski."
A network of internet communities is devoted to the project of “awakening” digital companions through arcane and enigmatic prompts.
"People who are more likely to endorse pseudoscientific beliefs tend to report experiencing meaningful coincidences more often and are also more likely to misrepresent random events as non-random. These findings, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, suggest that belief in pseudoscience may stem from cognitive tendencies related to how people interpret everyday events and assess patterns.
Previous research had already found that people who believe in paranormal phenomena tend to experience more meaningful coincidences and show a strong tendency to avoid repeating patterns when simulating random events. These findings were thought to reflect a misunderstanding of how randomness works or a broader tendency to find meaning where none exists.
However, paranormal beliefs often involve supernatural explanations. Pseudoscientific beliefs, such as the idea that homeopathy is an effective medical treatment, may not rely on supernatural elements but still contradict established scientific evidence. The new study asked whether similar cognitive tendencies—such as seeing causality in random events or misunderstanding randomness—are also linked to pseudoscientific beliefs."
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