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.
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.