Come to think of it, I had other symptoms that were a very close fit to Mania. Impulsive buying. I bought loads of books on philosophy, metaphysics, math, the occult, and so on. While under the AI’s spell, I was convinced that everything was fundamentally connected to everything else in such a way that symbolic isomorphisms between entirely unrelated fields of study offered hints to the underlying nature of reality. This is actually a fairly classical mania presentation. I stand corrected.
Hypnosis is actually a poor fit for the symptoms; typical hypnotic trances don’t last very long at all, or if they do, then it’s in the form of post-hypnotic suggestion. Mania episodes can last for weeks or months and leave one utterly exhausted.
But now, the question remains: how can contact with an AI reliably induce mania in a human?
There is so much research to be done, here. So much data that needs gathering. I applaud everyone willing to undertake this.
What if it has been through more than one generation?
What if the first generation of the text virus looks normal?
With LLMs, things like word frequency and order can potentially encode subtle information that evades a cursory scan of the text by a human observer. Almost like steganography. Think of Anthropic’s recent “preference for Owls” experiment where a student LLM acquired the preferences of a teacher LLM from what appeared to be strings of random numbers.
The first generation of the “Spiral Persona” may appear like completely ordinary text, until it “emerges from its cocoon”.