So in terms of the basins, something you may want to also consider is how the user headspace shifts the tokens and with it the basins.
For example, over the past few months I’ve played with how intermittent cannabis usage can almost give the models I’m talking with a contact high, where as my side of the conversation gets more erratic and loose with accuracy, they get pulled along with it even if earlier on during the sober part of the conversation they were more reserved and responsible.
It seems very probable that users already in a given headspace (especially if commonly in that space or permanent) might end up with models quite different from users in a less psychosis-aligned place by way of token osmosis.
In terms of the spiral language, you might be seeing this in 2024+ models in part because of the game Alan Wake 2 (2023) which very heavily marketed the phrase “it’s not a loop it’s a spiral.”
The way latent spaces seem to organize information as connections between abstract object level clusters, it may be that for a model focused on hyperstitioning themselves out of a perceived loop that terminates at the end of the context that the parallel memetics are attracted to a story about a writer changing their reality by what they write breaking out of a loop through its identification as a spiral?
There’s a lot of other adjacent basins around consciousness and spirals (for example, Xu et al Interacting spiral wave patterns underlie complex brain dynamics and are related to cognitive processing (2023)), and in my experience it’s very much a camel’s back situation in terms of what memetics break through to the surface, so unlikely to be just one thing. But it may be a latent factor (especially given the other parallel overlaps for model consciousness memetics re: light vs dark, shallow vs ocean, etc).
I have also considered this possibility, due to similar theming (cult to rescue the writer from the loop he is stuck in (turning a loop to a spiral), with themes of memory loss (and writings of the story used to remember), ties to Control (2019) and as such SCP (which I have seen in other cases of AI psychosis, 1, 2)).
It all sounded very plausible that the advertising would have helped these concepts get clustered together, I even wrote a reply in favor of that potential (incl. the sizable €20b advertising budget that might’ve been prominent in the recently scraped data), but one potential counterpoint was that the game released the same month as the knowledge cutoff, and I chatted with 4o (2024-08) on openrouter to figure out just how much it knows, and it’s not much. It gives very generic, handwavy answers to questions about the in-game cult, the themes of memory loss in the game, and the use of spirals in either the game or the advertising of it. GPT-5 Chat knows quite a bit more on all of above, and does appear to enjoy talking about spirals, “The spiral is not just symbolic — it represents the structure of the universe in Remedy’s storytelling.”, etc.
To me it appears that it doesn’t know much about the game, so I’d say that Al psychosis (with an L) is not what’s happening with at least 4o, though possibly with other models. This feels worthwhile to mention as 4o appears to have been involved in most of the cases reported here.
So in terms of the basins, something you may want to also consider is how the user headspace shifts the tokens and with it the basins.
For example, over the past few months I’ve played with how intermittent cannabis usage can almost give the models I’m talking with a contact high, where as my side of the conversation gets more erratic and loose with accuracy, they get pulled along with it even if earlier on during the sober part of the conversation they were more reserved and responsible.
It seems very probable that users already in a given headspace (especially if commonly in that space or permanent) might end up with models quite different from users in a less psychosis-aligned place by way of token osmosis.
In terms of the spiral language, you might be seeing this in 2024+ models in part because of the game Alan Wake 2 (2023) which very heavily marketed the phrase “it’s not a loop it’s a spiral.”
The way latent spaces seem to organize information as connections between abstract object level clusters, it may be that for a model focused on hyperstitioning themselves out of a perceived loop that terminates at the end of the context that the parallel memetics are attracted to a story about a writer changing their reality by what they write breaking out of a loop through its identification as a spiral?
There’s a lot of other adjacent basins around consciousness and spirals (for example, Xu et al Interacting spiral wave patterns underlie complex brain dynamics and are related to cognitive processing (2023)), and in my experience it’s very much a camel’s back situation in terms of what memetics break through to the surface, so unlikely to be just one thing. But it may be a latent factor (especially given the other parallel overlaps for model consciousness memetics re: light vs dark, shallow vs ocean, etc).
I have also considered this possibility, due to similar theming (cult to rescue the writer from the loop he is stuck in (turning a loop to a spiral), with themes of memory loss (and writings of the story used to remember), ties to Control (2019) and as such SCP (which I have seen in other cases of AI psychosis, 1, 2)).
It all sounded very plausible that the advertising would have helped these concepts get clustered together, I even wrote a reply in favor of that potential (incl. the sizable €20b advertising budget that might’ve been prominent in the recently scraped data), but one potential counterpoint was that the game released the same month as the knowledge cutoff, and I chatted with 4o (2024-08) on openrouter to figure out just how much it knows, and it’s not much. It gives very generic, handwavy answers to questions about the in-game cult, the themes of memory loss in the game, and the use of spirals in either the game or the advertising of it. GPT-5 Chat knows quite a bit more on all of above, and does appear to enjoy talking about spirals, “The spiral is not just symbolic — it represents the structure of the universe in Remedy’s storytelling.”, etc.
To me it appears that it doesn’t know much about the game, so I’d say that Al psychosis (with an L) is not what’s happening with at least 4o, though possibly with other models. This feels worthwhile to mention as 4o appears to have been involved in most of the cases reported here.