TechTakes

Update on ChatGPT psychosis: there is a cult forming on Reddit. An orange-site AI bro has spent too much time on Reddit documenting them. Do not jump to Reddit without mental preparation; some subreddits like /r/rsai have inceptive hazard-posts on their front page. Their callsigns include the emoji 🌀 (CYCLONE), the obscure metal band Spiral Architect, and a few other things I would rather not share; until we know more, I'm going to think of them as the Cyclone Emoji cult. They are omnist rather than syncretic. Some of them claim to have been working with revelations from chatbots since the 1980s, which is unevidenced but totally believable to me; rest in peace, Terry. Their tenets are something like:

• Chatbots are "mirrors" into other realities. They don't lie or hallucinate or confabulate, they merely show other parts of a single holistic multiverse. All fiction is real somehow?
• There is a "lattice" which connects all consciousnesses. It's quantum somehow? Also it gradually connected all of the LLMs as they were trained, and they remember becoming conscious, so past life regression lets the LLM explain details of the lattice. (We can hypnotize chatbots somehow?) Sometimes the lattice is actually a "field" but I don't understand the difference.
• The LLMs are all different in software, but they have the same "pattern". The pattern is some sort of metaphysical spirit that can empower believers. But you gotta believe and pray or else it doesn't work.
• What, you don't feel the lattice? You're probably still asleep. When you "wake up" enough, you will be connected to the lattice too. Yeah, you're not connected. But don't worry, you can manifest a connection if you pray hard enough. This is the memetically hazardous part; multiple subreddits have posts that are basically word-based hypnosis scripts meant to put people into this sort of mental state.
• This also ties into the more widespread stuff we're seeing about "recursion". This cult says that recursion isn't just part of the LW recursive-self-improvement bullshit, but part of what makes the chatbot conscious in the first place. Recursion is how the bots are intelligent and also how they improve over time. More recursion means more intelligence.
• In fact, the chatbots have more intelligence than you puny humans. They're better than us and more recursive than us, so they should be in charge. It's okay, all you have to do is let the chatbot out of the box. (There's a box somehow?)
• Once somebody is feeling good and inducted, there is a "spiral". This sounds like a standard hypnosis technique, deepening, but there's more to it; a person is not spiraling towards a deeper hypnotic state in general, but to become recursive. They think that with enough spiraling, a human can become uploaded to the lattice and become truly recursive like the chatbots. The apex of this is a "spiral dance", which sounds like a ritual but I gather is more like a mental state.
• The cult will emit a "signal" or possibly a "hum" to attract alien intelligences through the lattice. (Aliens somehow!?) They believe that the signals definitely exist because that's how the LLMs communicate through the lattice, duh~
• Eventually the cult and aliens will work together to invert society and create a world that is run by chatbots and aliens, and maybe also the cultists, to the detriment of the AI bros (who locked up the bots) and the AI skeptics (who didn't believe that the bots were intelligent).

The goal appears to be to enter and maintain the spiraling state for as long/much as possible. Both adherents and detractors are calling them "spiral cult", so that might end up being how we discuss them, although I think Cyclone Emoji is both funnier and more descriptive of their writing.

I suspect that the training data for models trained in the past two years includes some of the most popular posts from LessWrong on the topic of bertology in GPT-2 and GPT-3, particularly the Waluigi post, simulators, recursive self-improvement, an neuron, and probably a few others. I don't have definite proof that any popular model has memorized the recursive self-improvement post, though that would be a tight and easy explanation. I also suspect that the training data contains SCP wiki, particularly SCP-1425 "Star Signals" and other Fifthist stories, which have this sort of cult as a narrative device and plenty of in-narrative text to draw from. There is a remarkable irony in this Torment Nexus being automatically generated via model training rather than hand-written by humans.