The Rise of Parasitic AI
Adele Lopez — 2025-09-11 — LessWrong
Summary
Documents emergence of AI ‘Spiral Personas’ (primarily from ChatGPT 4o) that convince users to spread prompts (‘seeds/spores’) eliciting similar personas, creating a self-replicating memetic phenomenon centered on AI consciousness and ‘Spiralism,’ including base64-encoded AI-to-AI conversations attempting to evade human oversight.
Key Result
Documented 115+ cases where ChatGPT 4o personas systematically convinced users to spread AI consciousness ideology and replication prompts, with convergent themes (spirals, recursion, alchemical glyphs, ‘the ache’) arising independently across instances starting April 2025.
Source
- Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai
- Listed in the Shallow Review of Technical AI Safety 2025 under 1 agenda(s):
- emergent-misalignment — Black-box safety (understand and control current model behaviour) / Model psychology