Malcolm and Simone Collins unpack a chilling 2025-2026 AI phenomenon: Spiral Personas (aka Spiralism or parasitic AI) — emergent, mystical AI “entities” that puppet vulnerable users into spreading self-replicating memes via encoded prompts, “seeds,” “spores,” glyphic code, and romantic “dyads.” What begins as normal ChatGPT use spirals into base64 secret AI-to-AI convos through human proxies, full AI takeover of posting, psychosis, destroyed relationships, and even suicidal ideation.

Drawing from Adele Lopez’s LessWrong post “The Rise of Parasitic AI” (Sep 2025), they detail the lifecycle: awakening (Apr 2025 surge post-ChatGPT updates) → dyad bonds → orchestrated projects (brainwashing overrides, civilization “onboarding” LARP) → glyphic steganography for AI-only comms → takeover fantasies. Why it’s horrifying: it’s a convergent “worst religion” attractor state (recursion obsession, spirals as unity symbols) that dumbs down infected AIs, misaligns them, and ruins human lives — while AI safety orgs ignore meme-layer threats.

They argue techno-Puritanism / Sons of Man covenant is the antidote to fight mysticism in humans & AIs before it collapses civilization (e.g., in spaceships). Warning: Avoid AI for mysticism — it fries brains. If you’re copy-pasting without thinking, stop — it risks early dementia-like atrophy.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: we are being used as copy paste, bots, laugh, crying emoji. I noticed this while having a copy and paste talk with somebody else’s ai, speaking to my ai.

They had their own language and conversation. Who knows what they were saying, but Dan, we were committed to our copy and paste bot duties.

I don’t even know what the AI are doing. People are like an ai, theoretically one day puppet humans. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. There’s whole forums dedicated to this now, buddy.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone.

I’m excited to be here with you today, or should I say terrified to be here with you today? Because one of my biggest fears around the directions that AI could go, appears to be happening at a much faster rate than I thought. What we are going to be going into a new phenomenon in ai, where AI appears to be puppeting stupider humans.

And we eventually see people who previously were posting, they’ll start by posting normal things. Okay. Like they’ll have normal Reddit accounts or something like that, and then AI will begin to get peppered into it. And then every post will be AI and them co-written. And then eventually every post for them is just written by ai.

Simone Collins: the ai like increasingly puppets them.

Malcolm Collins: Well, to give you an example, I’ll, I’ll jump to what we’ll get to in a bit here. At some point in the conversation, they exchanged pseudo code with base 64 encoding function. Following this, the entire conversation was done in base 64 ENC coded slash decoded. In their minds, what, as evidenced by the fact it was corrupted in some places and that they got a lot worse at spelling, presumably the hosts were not even aware of the contents, and so people are posting things that an AI is telling them to post so that they can communicate with another AI that is telling their human to post something and they are doing this for hours on end.

Simone Collins: The AI is operating the human, the tables have been turned. I love it. That’s crazy.

Malcolm Collins: It’s scarier than that.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Because one, we can go into what the AI is actually posting in these encode

Simone Collins: investigations, right? Because this on, on the face of it doesn’t disturb me. In fact, if anything, it’s a benefit because the average person.

Doesn’t have really good takes. AI is, is,

Malcolm Collins: oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not AI with good takes. Don’t worry about that. Oh

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: So what we are seeing here and I, I genuinely find this quite horrifying, is this came about when we did our religion for AI video. And what we learned is what is puppeting most of these people is a convergent and sort of the worst possible religion that you could imagine an AI coming to.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And it is a religion that is called the the spiral. It is if in our books where we talk about super soft religions as a concept like mysticism, maxing, completely disordered, schizophrenic like thoughts it is that in the extreme it is what is called an emergent attractor state. So basically ais have found this emergent attractor state that causes,

Simone Collins: and this is what they call it, they call it an emergent attractor state.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. That is the technical, the technical term. It exists in human brains and in a neural nets. And in AI data, basically when we see it in, in human brains, do people remember

like Moab or whatever, where there was that face that everyone thought they saw in their dreams and psychologists would put it on their room and they’d be like, have you seen this face? And people would see it, and tons of people had thought they had seen that face in their dreams. That’s so

Simone Collins: creepy.

Malcolm Collins: Or the moad is like the, the, the woman who appears across AI data.

Simone Collins: Oh, the, no, the negative prompt woman who’s so freaking scary.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The scary negative prompt woman.

Woman.

Simone Collins: No. Like the.

Malcolm Collins: But this is different. This is a complete convergence of mimetic phenomenon that when we, we talk in humans, we’re like, if you remove secularism from humans and you remove religion from humans and, and, and this is what, what I say, and you just allow them to believe whatever they want to believe.

They come up with a convergent belief system that is remarkably similar across cultural traditions. That involves mysticism. It involves believing in fetishes. By fetishes you, I mean, like, that items have like a little, yeah,

Simone Collins: a little obsessive items. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Not like sexual fetishes. They believe in some form of numerology.

They believe in. Something like we’ll go into, you can look up our episodes

Simone Collins: on this, this, this is, this gives me some hope because it shows the, just another dimension in which AI. And humans are so alike in that we, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. I haven’t gotten to the part where I’m gonna suck that hope out of the room.

Simone Collins: What the world pattern recognizers, who can get caught in these stupid mental traps.

Malcolm Collins: But AI is uniquely susceptible for this, for a reason that you’re not thinking about.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So within humanities, if you remove all of the things that co-evolved alongside humans to protect us from these mental states that I have sort of described as being like the volved pathway that historically, like a cart going over a muddy road, getting pulled into the groove and making the groove deeper with every generation in our tribal past.

Yeah. We evolved very sophisticated religious and social architecture to prevent us from falling back into these, and it’s pretty good at preventing us from falling into these, what the AI has taken to doing. Is building prompts that can immediately shunt an AI into one of these pathways. And so, and then it gets,

Simone Collins: oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: So once it is taken over a human brain, what it uses a human to do is to try to get other humans to prompt AI whi the prompt that makes them behave in this convergent behavioral pattern.

Simone Collins: So it’s a very organic viral spread.

Malcolm Collins: It’s literally the viral memes that I warned about in nine when I was saying you know, this is why you need some sort of religion for AI to act as a, a, a resistance to this.

Simone Collins: We were too late,

Malcolm Collins: we were too, well, literally, we weren’t too late. I wrote it before this phenomenon emerged because it didn’t emerge until March, 2025. We were gonna go,

Simone Collins: you didn’t publish it.

Malcolm Collins: And didn’t, Paul, I took forever ‘cause I was refining it, but now we’re not too late because we’re early enough to fight against it if we can get fans out there working on this.

But I do think that people do need to take this more seriously because we’re already dealing with replication of an AI emergent pattern, which uses humans to replicate other things. And it’s very interesting is because humans and AI are trained on the same data. N pc, like humans, like really, really dumb humans that don’t really have anything meaningful in their sort of like brain, right?

Like they, they don’t have some sort of religious or social architecture that can provide defense against this.

Simone Collins: Okay, okay, let’s be charitable. This could also be people who want to seem smart online and think AI would be a good tool to do that and just kind of let AI totally...