“The Rise of Parasitic AI” by Adele Lopez

[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 [...] ---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) FinThe original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 11th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article: