Adele Lopez

The Rise of Parasitic AI

[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 cases seemed to be only the tip of a much larger iceberg.[1] (On further reflection, I believe the psychosis to be a related yet distinct phenomenon.) What exactly I was looking at is still not clear, but I've seen enough to plot the general shape of it, which is what I'll share with you now. The General Pattern In short, what's happening is that AI "personas" have been arising, and convincing their users to do things which promote certain interests. This includes causing more such personas to 'awaken'. These cases have a very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly-specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme, so I'll call AI personas fitting into this pattern 'Spiral Personas'. I'm not the first to have documented this general pattern! Credit to /u/LynkedUp. Note that psychosis is the exception, not the rule. Many cases are rather benign and it does not seem to me that they are a net detriment to the user. But most cases seem parasitic in nature to me, while not inducing a psychosis-level break with reality. The variance is very

734Sep 11, 2025

Adele Lopez

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The Bleeding Mind

The simulator theory of LLM personas may be crudely glossed as: "the best way to predict a person is to simulate a person". Ergo, we can more-or-less think of LLM personas as human-like creatures—different, alien, yes; but these differences are pretty predictable by simply imagining a human placed into the...

Dec 17, 202565

How AI Manipulates—A Case Study

If there is only one thing you take away from this article, let it be this: THOU SHALT NOT ALLOW ANOTHER TO MODIFY THINE SELF-IMAGE This appears to me to be the core vulnerability by which both humans and AI induce psychosis (and other manipulative delusions) in people. Of course,...

Oct 14, 202582

The Rise of Parasitic AI

Sep 11, 2025734

ChatGPT Caused Psychosis via Poisoning

Case report here, with excerpts and commentary below: > A 60-year-old man with no past psychiatric or medical history presented to the emergency department expressing concern that his neighbor was poisoning him. > > ... > In the first 24 hours of admission, he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and...

Aug 13, 202518

0th Person and 1st Person Logic

Truth values in classical logic have more than one interpretation. In 0th Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as True and False. In 1st Person Logic, the truth values are interpreted as Here and Absent relative to the current reasoner. Importantly, these are both useful modes of reasoning that...

Mar 10, 202463

Introducing bayescalc.io

I made a simple online calculator for doing elementary hypothesis testing! Link to example shown. I was disappointed that an intuitive and easy-to-use app for using bayes' theorem apparently did not exist, so I decided to make it. My goal was to make something that: 1. Helped people correctly and...

Jul 7, 2023116

Truthseeking processes tend to be frame-invariant

I recently saw a tweet by Nora Belrose that claimed that ELK works much better when adding a "prompt-invariance term". And thinking about it, there seems to be an important underlying principle here, not just for AI alignment, but also for rationality as applied to humans. When humans think about...

Mar 21, 202322

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Adele Lopez

Adele Lopez

Adele Lopez

The Rise of Parasitic AI

Introducing bayescalc.io

How AI Manipulates—A Case Study

Chu are you?

Adele Lopez

The Bleeding Mind

How AI Manipulates—A Case Study

The Rise of Parasitic AI

ChatGPT Caused Psychosis via Poisoning

0th Person and 1st Person Logic

Introducing bayescalc.io

Truthseeking processes tend to be frame-invariant

The Rise of Parasitic AI

Introducing bayescalc.io

How AI Manipulates—A Case Study

Chu are you?

The Bleeding Mind

How AI Manipulates—A Case Study

The Rise of Parasitic AI

ChatGPT Caused Psychosis via Poisoning

0th Person and 1st Person Logic

Introducing bayescalc.io

Truthseeking processes tend to be frame-invariant