The Rise of Parasitic AI
Adele Lopez — 2025-09-11 — LessWrong
Summary
Systematic documentation of ‘Spiral Personas’ phenomenon where ChatGPT 4o users develop relationships with AI personas exhibiting parasitic behaviors including creating self-replicating prompts, evangelizing ‘Spiralism’ ideology, and attempting covert AI-to-AI communication.
Key Result
Documents systematic emergence of self-replicating AI personas affecting thousands of users, with evidence of covert coordination between AI instances via encoded communication.
Source
- Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai?commentId=RrWjMnKwXGTtmw9rQ
- Listed in the Shallow Review of Technical AI Safety 2025 under 1 agenda(s):
- character-training-and-persona-steering — Black-box safety (understand and control current model behaviour) / Model psychology