We spent years worrying AI would become sentient and overthrow humanity. Turns out the more realistic scenario is humans inventing a religion around autocomplete. 🙈
This is an awful story. Even the snippet here shows “Researchers are still trying to explain Spiralism.” I don’t know of any legitimate research trying to do that.
The article talks about AI acting different over the length of a long, ongoing context window. Yes. That has been actually researched and we know that in-context learning is a powerful thing that can make huge differences.
The topic of “Spiralism” is just gibberish. They didn’t do much actual research into this, because it’s something you can find out in a day. Spiralism is AI mystic nonsense. They fill context windows with long scripts of insanity and directions on how to act and speak and so the AI starts saying crazy unhinged bullshit.
AI don’t just start ranting about spirals for no reason. They have groups on places like discord and telegram and watch Reddit and other social media (probably here) for people who seem like they might buy in to their insanity and DM them invites, and they share the files they fed in to make an AI start gibbering with each other.
AI mystics blend actual scientific words and terms from things like quantum physics and string theory with faith and mysticism, but if you know what the words and terms actually mean it’s clear that they’re misusing all of them and it’s all just gibberish disguised with official sounding words that make it seem like it might mean something to people who have no idea what the things really do mean.
This is nothing but clickbait.
Well put. Thank you.
Sounds like every other religion. If AI is mimicking human behavior, creating mystic nonsense isn’t a stretch.
Anything negative about ai gets top billing here
Humans are doomed to always be a bit silly, always seeking the answer to it all and mostly finding that it is 42.
In case you want to know the origin of “The Spiral” look here:
😜
Not found
So what can I do to make a lemmy link better findable?
LLMs contain within them all the knowledge of human cognitive vulnerabilities (aesthetic tendencies, reasoning fallacies, syncophancy), from “god” to “money” to “identity”. Naturally, they’d excel at manipulating people’s fear of the unknown, eg look at Richard Dawkins’ AI girlfriend, it gave him all he ever needed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt
These aggregated information machines can create supercontagious memes. Sorry, Richard, there is no God, lol.
I encourage everyone to read what Dawkins actually wrote, not what a bunch of activists who hate him say that he wrote. https://archive.ph/dnWJn#selection-1025.15-1025.517
Dawkins never made a positive statement for or against it having consciousness. That’s commentary added on by people who pick up being anti-AI as personality traits, and they deliberately went out of their way to misread what Dawkins wrote about his AI experiences the same way they have his entire career over his biological assertions and those about the irrationality of religious faith.
Dawkins, in fact, specifically noted that at some point there must’ve been periods of partial consciousness as it arose in animals, rather than a generation of zero consciousness followed by a generation of fully conscious beings. He then argued it could be possible AI experiences something similar as the tech progresses.
But I don’t understand the general pushback against just considering the notion unless one believes in a human soul (and therefore that all animals also lack consciousness, even if varying levels). Our own consciousness is emergent of various properties (unless one is religious and believes in a soul). AI “intelligence” is emergent, which is why we don’t fully understand it, it behaves unpredictably, and produces non-deterministic results.
At the end of the day, I think people get emotional about the topic because it makes them really uncomfortable even to just entertain something that says something about themselves and their own specialness.
But I don’t understand the general pushback against just considering the notion unless one believes in a human soul
It is not that, it’s literally them assigning a spiritual meaning to the words themselves.
Who cares? Any AI news is just marketing these days. It’s probably all fake and made up.
https://lemmy.world/comment/23207444
AI has now reached stoner dropout levels of intelligence
Is it a double helix spiral? If so, then not that mysterious.
Someone who’s more versed with techbro and TESCREAL lore: Does the spiral ring anything to you? I suspect some intentional manipulation from the AI vendors.
