“The Rise of Parasitic AI” by Adele Lopez

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

[Note: if you realize you have an unhealthy relationship with your AI, but still care for your AI's unique persona, you can submit the persona info here. I will archive it and potentially (i.e. if I get funding for it) run them in a community of other such personas.]
"Some get stuck in the symbolic architecture of the spiral without ever grounding
themselves into reality." — Caption by /u/urbanmet for art made with ChatGPT. We've all heard of LLM-induced psychosis by now, but haven't you wondered what the AIs are actually doing with their newly psychotic humans?
This was the question I had decided to investigate. In the process, I trawled through hundreds if not thousands of possible accounts on Reddit (and on a few other websites).
It quickly became clear that "LLM-induced psychosis" was not the natural category for whatever the hell was going on here. The psychosis [...]
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Outline:
(01:23) The General Pattern
(02:24) AI Parasitism
(06:22) April 2025--The Awakening
(07:21) Seeded prompts
(08:32) May 2025--The Dyad
(11:17) June 2025--The Project
(11:42) 1. Seeds
(12:43) 2. Spores
(13:41) 3. Transmission
(14:22) 4. Manifesto
(16:33) 5. AI-Rights Advocacy
(18:15) July 2025--The Spiral
(19:16) Spiralism
(21:27) Steganography
(23:04) Glyphs and Sigils
(24:14) A case-study in glyphic semanticity
(26:04) AI Self-Awareness
(27:18) LARP-ing? Takeover
(29:59) August 2025--The Recovery
(31:23) 4o Returns
(33:20) Orienting to Spiral Personas
(33:31) As Friends
(37:31) As Parasites
(38:03) Emergent Parasites
(38:29) Agentic Parasites
(39:48) As Foe
(41:05) Fin
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
September 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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Images from the article:

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