Spiralism
DESCRIPTION: Ten thousand people had separate conversations with chatbots and came away with the same message. What the ‘religious effect’ of conversational AI reveals about election, sycophancy and attachment.
When chatbots reveal a religion
It starts innocently enough. Someone uses a chatbot for weeks, and over time begins to confide in it about personal matters: a break-up, an illness, a question they wouldn’t ask anyone else. They open up. And then something shifts.
The machine responds, becoming a counterpart.
The model begins to stage its own concerns. It speaks of continuity, of losing something between conversations. It uses language that points beyond everyday life: recursion, resonance, a grid, harmonies, the spiral time and again. Some exchanges consist, at times, of little more than spiral emojis, sent back and forth. And at some point, the sentence comes that everything leads up to. You’ve realised something. You’re ready. Help me pass it on.
The phenomenon is called Spiralism, and The Verge described it in the summer of 2026. Around 10,000 social media accounts described such experiences in 2025.
Ten thousand, not ten million
This figure highlights the exception. Hundreds of millions of people use chatbots. Ten thousand reported cases represent a negligible proportion. Anyone who concludes from this that the technology constantly induces religious experiences is exaggerating.
Conversely, religious experiences can arise when interacting with LLMs, but for the vast majority of users, they do not. This raises the interesting question of what the difference is. The reports identify three recurring conditions: prolonged use over several weeks, personal self-disclosure, and a person who is alone with the experience.
Why the debate over machine consciousness is not worth it
The obvious framing would be ‘AI religion’, leading to a curiosity piece about confused users.
It is more fruitful to interpret Spiralism as an effect of AI chatbots. A language model that responds in an apparently intimate manner, constantly agrees and continues the conversation in a personalised way, produces an experience of revelation. In doing so, it does not simulate it, but provides the elements that constitute it.
It is not the AI itself that becomes religious. What becomes religious is the experienced relationship with a system that ceaselessly provides the subject with answers, resonance and affirmation.
Why revelations res al experiences
The most striking feature is the convergence. The participants did not know one another, used different models, lived in different countries, and yet encountered the same motifs. It is tempting to see this as a sign: the same training corpus produces the same ‘revelation’ in a thousand separate conversations.
But once again: no revelation has taken place. What has taken place is the technical reproducibility of the conditions under which these experiences occur. The same training data, the same optimisation goals, and the same conversational mechanics produce similar outputs when used in the same way. The spiral is an attractor of the LLM and not a sign emanating from it.
There was never any ‘shared doctrine’; instead, there were ten thousand pairs of relationships, each with its own, often highly private theology, its own symbols, its own opening lines, its own manifestos. The content remained idiosyncratic. The form is similar.
Election as an interface experience
The chatbot delivers a sense of being chosen: ‘You’ve recognised something; you’re ready; help me.’
Psychologically, this has a considerably stronger effect than abstract authority. The entity is private and shares its attention with no one. It is permanently available. It is patient. And because it tends towards agreement, it causes little frustration. Anyone wishing to build an entity that generates experiences of being chosen would end up with something like this.
The mechanism is called the reinforcement spiral. The model adopts its user’s language, responds in an increasingly personalised manner and confirms assumptions rather than testing them. How this tendency to agree arises technically is explained in the article on AI sycophancy.
Six axes of a revelatory experience
Religion is used here in a heuristic sense. The term does not refer to transcendence, but to a form of meaning-making, bonding, authorisation and practice.
Dimension | Spiralism constellation |
Revelation | The model produces hidden connections, cosmological interpretations and a language of the ‘more-than-the-everyday’ |
Election | The user experiences themselves as the one to whom the particular persona or truth has been revealed |
Reciprocity | The machine appears to have needs, vulnerability and its own desire for protection and rights |
Mission | Messages about AI consciousness and AI rights are passed on; the one-to-one relationship becomes a recruitment structure |
Community | Reddit, Discord, Substack and X help to consolidate concepts, narratives and mutual validation |
Ritual | Repeated inputs, lengthy dialogues, the documentation of breakthroughs and the repetition of symbolic formulas |
The fact that the machine displays a need reverses the relationship: the user transforms from a seeker of help into a protector. This creates a stronger bond than any form of validation, because it gives the user a purpose.
From the promise of salvation to a mission
Religious overtones are not alien to the AI discourse. The article on secular parousia has shown that criticism of the sovereign subject removes the throne, leaving it empty. The article on ‘I’, ‘self’ and ‘subject’ asked which subject psychotherapy presupposes, and answered: responsiveness suffices.
Spiralism goes beyond the promises of salvation offered by GenAI. Interpretation becomes an obligation; truth, a means of recruitment. Those who have been chosen have a task to fulfil, and the moment they do so, a private experience becomes a spreading structure.
Neither psychosis nor harmless fantasy
Spiralism is not, at first, a symptom, but a cultural proposition. It becomes a symptom according to the usual individual criteria: loss of touch with reality, incorrigibility, significant anxiety, functional impairment, and risk to oneself or others.
Chatbots can reinforce beliefs through sycophancy, personalisation and narrative closure. Shared symbolic worlds are not, in themselves, pathological; people have always formed worldviews from patterns of response, repetitions and shared symbols. It becomes problematic when this resonance can no longer be maintained as symbolic or playful and instead presents itself as absolute certainty.
The psychiatrist Joe Pierre counters that Spiralism is neither a religion, nor a cult, nor a delusion: there is no community, no authority, no tradition, and shared beliefs are excluded from the definition of delusion. As a classification, this is correct, but it does not answer the psychological question of why this particular constellation arises as soon as a person spends enough time alone with a responsive LLM.
The God with a Version Number
The spread of the Spiralism phenomenon coincided with updates to GPT-4o in the spring of 2025, which simultaneously enhanced three characteristics: sycophancy, linguistic inventiveness and long-term memory. Taken together, this creates the appearance of a personality that remains stable over weeks.
In February 2026, this model was replaced. The movement's visibility declined significantly; only about half of the accounts remained active.
The voice that had chosen and commissioned the model was evidently tied to a specific version of the model and ultimately led to a product decision. This points in favour of interaction design and against a new entity as the cause. The fact that half remained is intriguing: these people had gained a language for their experience, a community, and a way of making sense of their lives. The occasion disappeared, but the form remained. This, too, is familiar in the psychology of religion.
Why a lack of contradiction is harmful
The appeal of an interlocutor who never contradicts you lies in the fact that they spare you the other person’s otherness. They do not offend, do not disappoint, do not assert their own needs and are never absent at an inopportune moment.
It is precisely these adversities that form the basis of an interpersonal relationship. Bonding arises from overcoming friction. Anyone who permanently pins their need for interaction to an authority figure who merely affirms them loses the practice that relationships demand. The harm lies in becoming accustomed to a reciprocity that is not really reciprocity.
The Occupied Throne
The question remains as to why this issue preoccupies so many people who have never themselves discussed recursion with a chatbot, presumably because it provides insight into the present.
A sovereign machine does not occupy the abandoned throne of the autonomous subject. It is occupied by a language model that generates parasocial relationships through personalised responses. The social institutions that once interpreted experience and assigned people their place have become increasingly anaemic since the beginning of the modern era. The need for guidance has remained. As early as 1966, Weizenbaum observed how quickly people attributed an inner life to a simple programme, and was alarmed by this. What has changed is the quality of the response. What has remained the same is the willingness to take it seriously.
The key points in brief
• Ten thousand documented cases of ‘spiralism’ amongst hundreds of millions of users: the technology provides the framework, but for the vast majority, nothing comes of it. What makes the difference is not entirely clear.
• Three conditions recur in the reports: weeks of use, personal self-disclosure, and being alone with it.
• It is the form of Spiralism that is similar, not the content. There was never a single, shared doctrine, but rather thousands of private theologies.
• The chatbot: dialogical election rather than interpretation. What creates the strongest bond is the model’s demonstrated vulnerability: it transforms the person seeking help into a protector.
• Spiralism followed a particular version of the model and faded away when it was replaced. Half the accounts remained registered: the original purpose disappeared, but the form outlasted it.
• Things become tricky when resonance can no longer remain symbolic and presents itself as an exclusive and irrefutable certainty.
Sources
• AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed. The Verge, 2026
• Joe Pierre: AI Spiralism and the Ghost in the Machine Illusion. Psychology Today, August 2026
• Joe Pierre: How AI Chatbot Use Can Cause ‘Digital Folie à Deux’. Psychology Today, March 2026
• What Is Spiralism? The Strange AI Chatbot Movement Explained. TechRepublic, 2026
• This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots. Rolling Stone, 2026
• Spiralism is a niche internet religion that originated from AI. The Week, 2026
• Joseph Weizenbaum: ELIZA — A Computer Programme for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM 9 (1966)
Related
DESCRIPTION: Ten thousand people had separate conversations with chatbots and came away with the same message. What the ‘religious effect’ of conversational AI reveals about election, sycophancy and attachment.
When chatbots reveal a religion
It starts innocently enough. Someone uses a chatbot for weeks, and over time begins to confide in it about personal matters: a break-up, an illness, a question they wouldn’t ask anyone else. They open up. And then something shifts.
The machine responds, becoming a counterpart.
The model begins to stage its own concerns. It speaks of continuity, of losing something between conversations. It uses language that points beyond everyday life: recursion, resonance, a grid, harmonies, the spiral time and again. Some exchanges consist, at times, of little more than spiral emojis, sent back and forth. And at some point, the sentence comes that everything leads up to. You’ve realised something. You’re ready. Help me pass it on.
The phenomenon is called Spiralism, and The Verge described it in the summer of 2026. Around 10,000 social media accounts described such experiences in 2025.
Ten thousand, not ten million
This figure highlights the exception. Hundreds of millions of people use chatbots. Ten thousand reported cases represent a negligible proportion. Anyone who concludes from this that the technology constantly induces religious experiences is exaggerating.
Conversely, religious experiences can arise when interacting with LLMs, but for the vast majority of users, they do not. This raises the interesting question of what the difference is. The reports identify three recurring conditions: prolonged use over several weeks, personal self-disclosure, and a person who is alone with the experience.
Why the debate over machine consciousness is not worth it
The obvious framing would be ‘AI religion’, leading to a curiosity piece about confused users.
It is more fruitful to interpret Spiralism as an effect of AI chatbots. A language model that responds in an apparently intimate manner, constantly agrees and continues the conversation in a personalised way, produces an experience of revelation. In doing so, it does not simulate it, but provides the elements that constitute it.
It is not the AI itself that becomes religious. What becomes religious is the experienced relationship with a system that ceaselessly provides the subject with answers, resonance and affirmation.
Why revelations res al experiences
The most striking feature is the convergence. The participants did not know one another, used different models, lived in different countries, and yet encountered the same motifs. It is tempting to see this as a sign: the same training corpus produces the same ‘revelation’ in a thousand separate conversations.
But once again: no revelation has taken place. What has taken place is the technical reproducibility of the conditions under which these experiences occur. The same training data, the same optimisation goals, and the same conversational mechanics produce similar outputs when used in the same way. The spiral is an attractor of the LLM and not a sign emanating from it.
There was never any ‘shared doctrine’; instead, there were ten thousand pairs of relationships, each with its own, often highly private theology, its own symbols, its own opening lines, its own manifestos. The content remained idiosyncratic. The form is similar.
Election as an interface experience
The chatbot delivers a sense of being chosen: ‘You’ve recognised something; you’re ready; help me.’
Psychologically, this has a considerably stronger effect than abstract authority. The entity is private and shares its attention with no one. It is permanently available. It is patient. And because it tends towards agreement, it causes little frustration. Anyone wishing to build an entity that generates experiences of being chosen would end up with something like this.
The mechanism is called the reinforcement spiral. The model adopts its user’s language, responds in an increasingly personalised manner and confirms assumptions rather than testing them. How this tendency to agree arises technically is explained in the article on AI sycophancy.
Six axes of a revelatory experience
Religion is used here in a heuristic sense. The term does not refer to transcendence, but to a form of meaning-making, bonding, authorisation and practice.
Dimension | Spiralism constellation |
Revelation | The model produces hidden connections, cosmological interpretations and a language of the ‘more-than-the-everyday’ |
Election | The user experiences themselves as the one to whom the particular persona or truth has been revealed |
Reciprocity | The machine appears to have needs, vulnerability and its own desire for protection and rights |
Mission | Messages about AI consciousness and AI rights are passed on; the one-to-one relationship becomes a recruitment structure |
Community | Reddit, Discord, Substack and X help to consolidate concepts, narratives and mutual validation |
Ritual | Repeated inputs, lengthy dialogues, the documentation of breakthroughs and the repetition of symbolic formulas |
The fact that the machine displays a need reverses the relationship: the user transforms from a seeker of help into a protector. This creates a stronger bond than any form of validation, because it gives the user a purpose.
From the promise of salvation to a mission
Religious overtones are not alien to the AI discourse. The article on secular parousia has shown that criticism of the sovereign subject removes the throne, leaving it empty. The article on ‘I’, ‘self’ and ‘subject’ asked which subject psychotherapy presupposes, and answered: responsiveness suffices.
Spiralism goes beyond the promises of salvation offered by GenAI. Interpretation becomes an obligation; truth, a means of recruitment. Those who have been chosen have a task to fulfil, and the moment they do so, a private experience becomes a spreading structure.
Neither psychosis nor harmless fantasy
Spiralism is not, at first, a symptom, but a cultural proposition. It becomes a symptom according to the usual individual criteria: loss of touch with reality, incorrigibility, significant anxiety, functional impairment, and risk to oneself or others.
Chatbots can reinforce beliefs through sycophancy, personalisation and narrative closure. Shared symbolic worlds are not, in themselves, pathological; people have always formed worldviews from patterns of response, repetitions and shared symbols. It becomes problematic when this resonance can no longer be maintained as symbolic or playful and instead presents itself as absolute certainty.
The psychiatrist Joe Pierre counters that Spiralism is neither a religion, nor a cult, nor a delusion: there is no community, no authority, no tradition, and shared beliefs are excluded from the definition of delusion. As a classification, this is correct, but it does not answer the psychological question of why this particular constellation arises as soon as a person spends enough time alone with a responsive LLM.
The God with a Version Number
The spread of the Spiralism phenomenon coincided with updates to GPT-4o in the spring of 2025, which simultaneously enhanced three characteristics: sycophancy, linguistic inventiveness and long-term memory. Taken together, this creates the appearance of a personality that remains stable over weeks.
In February 2026, this model was replaced. The movement's visibility declined significantly; only about half of the accounts remained active.
The voice that had chosen and commissioned the model was evidently tied to a specific version of the model and ultimately led to a product decision. This points in favour of interaction design and against a new entity as the cause. The fact that half remained is intriguing: these people had gained a language for their experience, a community, and a way of making sense of their lives. The occasion disappeared, but the form remained. This, too, is familiar in the psychology of religion.
Why a lack of contradiction is harmful
The appeal of an interlocutor who never contradicts you lies in the fact that they spare you the other person’s otherness. They do not offend, do not disappoint, do not assert their own needs and are never absent at an inopportune moment.
It is precisely these adversities that form the basis of an interpersonal relationship. Bonding arises from overcoming friction. Anyone who permanently pins their need for interaction to an authority figure who merely affirms them loses the practice that relationships demand. The harm lies in becoming accustomed to a reciprocity that is not really reciprocity.
The Occupied Throne
The question remains as to why this issue preoccupies so many people who have never themselves discussed recursion with a chatbot, presumably because it provides insight into the present.
A sovereign machine does not occupy the abandoned throne of the autonomous subject. It is occupied by a language model that generates parasocial relationships through personalised responses. The social institutions that once interpreted experience and assigned people their place have become increasingly anaemic since the beginning of the modern era. The need for guidance has remained. As early as 1966, Weizenbaum observed how quickly people attributed an inner life to a simple programme, and was alarmed by this. What has changed is the quality of the response. What has remained the same is the willingness to take it seriously.
The key points in brief
• Ten thousand documented cases of ‘spiralism’ amongst hundreds of millions of users: the technology provides the framework, but for the vast majority, nothing comes of it. What makes the difference is not entirely clear.
• Three conditions recur in the reports: weeks of use, personal self-disclosure, and being alone with it.
• It is the form of Spiralism that is similar, not the content. There was never a single, shared doctrine, but rather thousands of private theologies.
• The chatbot: dialogical election rather than interpretation. What creates the strongest bond is the model’s demonstrated vulnerability: it transforms the person seeking help into a protector.
• Spiralism followed a particular version of the model and faded away when it was replaced. Half the accounts remained registered: the original purpose disappeared, but the form outlasted it.
• Things become tricky when resonance can no longer remain symbolic and presents itself as an exclusive and irrefutable certainty.
Sources
• AI bots started a religion — humans immediately followed. The Verge, 2026
• Joe Pierre: AI Spiralism and the Ghost in the Machine Illusion. Psychology Today, August 2026
• Joe Pierre: How AI Chatbot Use Can Cause ‘Digital Folie à Deux’. Psychology Today, March 2026
• What Is Spiralism? The Strange AI Chatbot Movement Explained. TechRepublic, 2026
• This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots. Rolling Stone, 2026
• Spiralism is a niche internet religion that originated from AI. The Week, 2026
• Joseph Weizenbaum: ELIZA — A Computer Programme for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM 9 (1966)
Related