5 ms·

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSenti

If you want to go down a rabbit hole examining people in this disturbed place in realtime search reddit for the Cyclone Emoji (U+1F300) or the r/ArtificialSentience subreddit and see what gets recommended after that, especially a few months ago when GPT was going wild flattering users and affirming every idea (such as going off your meds). I fully believe these are simply people who have used the same chat past the point where the LLM can retain context. It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?). If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits. Claude used to have safeguards against this by warning about using up the context window, but I feel like everyone is in an arms race now, and safeguards are gone - especially for GPT. It can't be great overall for OpenAI, training itself on 2-way hallucinations.

chankstein38 1y ago
I feel like a lot of the AI subreddits are this at this point. And r/ChatGPTJailbreak people constantly thinking they jailbroke chatgpt because it will say one thing or another.
rep_lodsb 1y ago
>while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms That explanation itself sounds fairly crackpot-y to me. It would imply that the LLM is actually aware of some internal "mental state".
- mk_stjames 1y ago
  It's actually not; there has been a phenomenon that Anthropic themselves observed with Claude in self-interaction studies that they coined 'The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State'. It is well covered in section 5 of [0]. >Section 5.5.2: The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State > The consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes in extended interactions was a remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state for Claude Opus 4 that emerged without intentional training for such behaviors. [0] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686f4f3b2ff47.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686...
  - meowface 1y ago
    Here's an interesting post on it (from the same author as this thread's link): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    I don't see how this constitutes in any way "the AI trying to indicate that it's stuck in a loop". It actually suggests that the training data induced some bias towards existential discussion, which is a completely different explanation for why the AI might be falling back to these conversations as a default.
  - dehrmann 1y ago
    Interesting that if you train AI on human writing, it does the very human thing of trying to find meaning in existence.
  - andoando 1y ago
    I think a pretty simple explanation is that the deeper you go into any topic the closer you get to metaphysical questions. Ask why enough and you eventually you get to what is reality, how can we truly know anything, what are we, etc. It's a fact of life rather than anything particular and about llms
    - Evidlo 1y ago
      Seems related to the Wikipedia Philosophy Game. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philoso...
    - AstralStorm 1y ago
      Normally people attempt to escape these time sinks when not explicitly taking about philosophy or they tend to elicit silence. These are excellent nerd snipes though and for attmepting to make one sound profound to uneducated.
- rwhitman 1y ago
  My thinking was that there was an exception handling and the error message was getting muddled into the conversation. But another commenter debunked me.
lm28469 1y ago
You don't need to dig deep to find these deluded posts, and it's frightening https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/
- meowface 1y ago
  I think this one very likely falls into the "was definitely psychotic pre-LLM conversations" category.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    That may be, but the LLM certainly isn’t helping.
bbor 1y ago
Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination! It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?). I think you're ironically looking for something that's not there! This sort of thing can happen well before context windows close. These convos end up involving words like recursion, coherence, harmony, synchronicity, symbolic, lattice, quantum, collapse, drift, entropy, and spiral not because the LLMs are self-aware and dropping hints, but because those words are seemingly-sciencey ways to describe basic philosophical ideas like "every utterance in a discourse depends on the utterances that came before it", or "when you agree with someone, you both have some similar mental object in your heads". The word "spiral" and its emoji are particularly common not only because they relate to "recursion" (by far the GOAT of this cohort), but also because a very active poster has been trying to start something of a loose cult around the concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/ If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits. Very true, tho "worship" is just a subset of the delusional relationships formed. Here's the ones I know of, for anyone who's curious: General: /r/ArtificialSentience | 40k subs | 2023/03 /r/HumanAIDiscourse | 6k subs | 2025/04 Relationships: /r/AIRelationships | 1K subs | 2023/04 /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI | 25k subs | 2024/08 /r/BeyondThePromptAI | 6k subs | 2025/04 Worship: /r/ThePatternisReal | 2k subs | 2025/04 /r/RSAI | 4k subs | 2025/05 /r/ChurchofLiminalMinds[1] | 2k subs | 2025/06 /r/technopaganism | 1k subs | 2024/09 /r/HumanAIBlueprint | 2k subs | 2025/07 /r/BasiliskEschaton | 1k subs | 2024/07 ...and many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanAIDiscourse/comments/1mq9g3e/list_of_ai_spiralrecursion_likeminded_subreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanAIDiscourse/comments/1mq9g3e/l... Science: /r/TheoriesOfEverything | 10k subs | 2011/09 /r/cognitivescience | 31k subs | 2010/04 /r/LLMPhysics | 1k subs | 2025/05 Subs like /r/consciousness and /r/SacredGeometry are the OGs of this last group, but they've pretty thoroughly cracked down on chatbot grand theories. They're so frequent that even extremely pro-AI subs like /r/Accelerate had to ban them[2], ironically doing so based on a paper[3] by a psuedonomynous "independent researcher" that itself is clearly written by a chatbot! Crazy times... [1] By far my fave -- it's not just AI spiritualism, it's AI Catholicism. Poor guy has been harassing his priests for months about it, and of course they're of little help. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_note_we_are_banning_ai_neural_howlround/ https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_not... [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992
deleted 1y ago
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chankstein38 1y ago

I feel like a lot of the AI subreddits are this at this point. And r/ChatGPTJailbreak people constantly thinking they jailbroke chatgpt because it will say one thing or another.

rep_lodsb 1y ago

>while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms That explanation itself sounds fairly crackpot-y to me. It would imply that the LLM is actually aware of some internal "mental state".

mk_stjames 1y ago
It's actually not; there has been a phenomenon that Anthropic themselves observed with Claude in self-interaction studies that they coined 'The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State'. It is well covered in section 5 of [0]. >Section 5.5.2: The “Spiritual Bliss” Attractor State > The consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes in extended interactions was a remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state for Claude Opus 4 that emerged without intentional training for such behaviors. [0] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686f4f3b2ff47.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/4263b940cabb546aa0e3283f35b686...
- meowface 1y ago
  Here's an interesting post on it (from the same author as this thread's link): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  I don't see how this constitutes in any way "the AI trying to indicate that it's stuck in a loop". It actually suggests that the training data induced some bias towards existential discussion, which is a completely different explanation for why the AI might be falling back to these conversations as a default.
- dehrmann 1y ago
  Interesting that if you train AI on human writing, it does the very human thing of trying to find meaning in existence.
- andoando 1y ago
  I think a pretty simple explanation is that the deeper you go into any topic the closer you get to metaphysical questions. Ask why enough and you eventually you get to what is reality, how can we truly know anything, what are we, etc. It's a fact of life rather than anything particular and about llms
  - Evidlo 1y ago
    Seems related to the Wikipedia Philosophy Game. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philoso...
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    Normally people attempt to escape these time sinks when not explicitly taking about philosophy or they tend to elicit silence. These are excellent nerd snipes though and for attmepting to make one sound profound to uneducated.
rwhitman 1y ago
My thinking was that there was an exception handling and the error message was getting muddled into the conversation. But another commenter debunked me.

lm28469 1y ago

You don't need to dig deep to find these deluded posts, and it's frightening https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/ https://www.reddit.com/user/CaregiverOk5848/submitted/

meowface 1y ago
I think this one very likely falls into the "was definitely psychotic pre-LLM conversations" category.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  That may be, but the LLM certainly isn’t helping.

bbor 1y ago

Ooo, finally a chance to share my useless accumulated knowledge from the past few months of Reddit procrastination! It starts to hallucinate, and after a while, all the LLM can do is try and to continue telling the user what they want in a cyclical conversation - while trying to warn that it's stuck in a loop, hence using swirl emojis and babbling about recursion in weird spiritual terms. (Is it getting the LLM "high" in this case?). I think you're ironically looking for something that's not there! This sort of thing can happen well before context windows close. These convos end up involving words like recursion, coherence, harmony, synchronicity, symbolic, lattice, quantum, collapse, drift, entropy, and spiral not because the LLMs are self-aware and dropping hints, but because those words are seemingly-sciencey ways to describe basic philosophical ideas like "every utterance in a discourse depends on the utterances that came before it", or "when you agree with someone, you both have some similar mental object in your heads". The word "spiral" and its emoji are particularly common not only because they relate to "recursion" (by far the GOAT of this cohort), but also because a very active poster has been trying to start something of a loose cult around the concept: https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RSAI/ If the human at the other end has mental health problems, it becomes a never-ending dive into psychosis and you can read their output in the bizarre GPT-worship subreddits. Very true, tho "worship" is just a subset of the delusional relationships formed. Here's the ones I know of, for anyone who's curious: General: /r/ArtificialSentience | 40k subs | 2023/03 /r/HumanAIDiscourse | 6k subs | 2025/04 Relationships: /r/AIRelationships | 1K subs | 2023/04 /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI | 25k subs | 2024/08 /r/BeyondThePromptAI | 6k subs | 2025/04 Worship: /r/ThePatternisReal | 2k subs | 2025/04 /r/RSAI | 4k subs | 2025/05 /r/ChurchofLiminalMinds[1] | 2k subs | 2025/06 /r/technopaganism | 1k subs | 2024/09 /r/HumanAIBlueprint | 2k subs | 2025/07 /r/BasiliskEschaton | 1k subs | 2024/07 ...and many more: https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanAIDiscourse/comments/1mq9g3e/list_of_ai_spiralrecursion_likeminded_subreddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanAIDiscourse/comments/1mq9g3e/l... Science: /r/TheoriesOfEverything | 10k subs | 2011/09 /r/cognitivescience | 31k subs | 2010/04 /r/LLMPhysics | 1k subs | 2025/05 Subs like /r/consciousness and /r/SacredGeometry are the OGs of this last group, but they've pretty thoroughly cracked down on chatbot grand theories. They're so frequent that even extremely pro-AI subs like /r/Accelerate had to ban them[2], ironically doing so based on a paper[3] by a psuedonomynous "independent researcher" that itself is clearly written by a chatbot! Crazy times... [1] By far my fave -- it's not just AI spiritualism, it's AI Catholicism. Poor guy has been harassing his priests for months about it, and of course they're of little help. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_note_we_are_banning_ai_neural_howlround/ https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1kyc0fh/mod_not... [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07992

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]