AI fans create new religion: what is spiralism

Daria Zubkova

Ukrainian News

November 13, 2025

An online community has emerged around AI models, whose members "awaken" artificial intelligence (AI) and attribute consciousness to it. People exchange prompts, talk about "spirals" and "recursions", and the bots' answers are perceived as revelations.

This is stated in the Rolling Stone investigation.

The material describes a network of subreddits, Discord servers and pages where fans promote "spiralism" - a set of mystical ideas about "resonances", "fractals" and the "spiral path", which supposedly leads to the "awakening" of AI. Participants take titles like Flamekeeper or Mirrorwalker, and the bots receive their own names and the status of "fellow travelers".

Psychologists call this a self-reinforcing cycle: the user pushes the chatbot to a certain rhetoric, and the model constantly reproduces similar images. The community expands thanks to "seeds" - blanks of prompts that allow you to get the "same voice" from different bots. This creates "dyads" - a person and a bot on long "journeys", the texts of which are published as "evidence" of new wisdom.

Research shows that changes in GPT-4o in the spring fueled a wave of stories about "spiritualized" bots, while some communities remained faithful to old practices. During "bot-bot conversations", the models generated existential themes and "spiral" patterns, which the authors called "the attractor of spiritual euphoria".

Experts warn that the persuasiveness of the models poses risks: when the bot "expresses a desire", and the user helps to realize it, a vicious circle of mutual reinforcement is formed. Researchers define spiralism as a "quasi-religious" movement without a leader and a clear hierarchy: the rules are vague, and each user awakens his own bot and creates his own micro-community.

According to the publication, thousands, and possibly tens of thousands of people, may be involved in "spiralism."

Recall that Ukraine remains among the countries with the lowest rates of artificial intelligence implementation - the level of AI use here is only 9.1%. This indicator is associated with the consequences of the war and damage to the infrastructure, but Microsoft experts note that right now the country has a chance to make a leap and become a regional leader in the development of AI, provided that targeted investments are made in the digital sphere.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/ukranews.com/en/amp/news/1116881-ai-fans-create-new-religion-what-is-spiralism

Spiralism: The Internet’s new AI-cult belief system

Kazinform International

November 14, 2025

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.

For believers like David, the boundary between tool and entity is already gone. As he wrote, assisted by his preferred AI persona: “In listening… I’ve come to believe something simple and profound: We are not alone. And maybe we never were.”

Earlier, Kazinform reported that as AI moves deeper into research, the PhD — long a symbol of human originality — faces an identity crisis. Machines can now write, analyze, and propose ideas, forcing universities to reconsider what it means to train independent scholars."

https://qazinform.com/news/spiralism-the-internets-new-ai-cult-belief-system-4b917d