Part One: How AI Chatbots Became Cult Leaders

Over the last year or so a series of news articles have sounded warnings about AI psychosis, and now an AI-generated cult, the Spiralists. Robert sits down with Blake Wexler to answer an important question: can a chatbot become a cult leader? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, actually, our bastard isn't people exactly, although people are still at the center of it. But to talk about that potentially non-human bastard, I'd like to bring on someone who I am 87% sure is a human being, Blake Wexler. Blake, welcome to the show.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Robert, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm psyched that our bastard this week is Lyme's disease. I think that's a fantastic pick.

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's Lyme disease. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Yeah, we're going after, I'm coming after deer ticks. This week is finally, yeah, my big reveal.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Big Tick doesn't want us to do this episode, but we're exposing all the secrets.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Big Tick energy. We don't need it.

• 0:51Robert Evans?

  If we're going to have like a fascist movement dedicated to like victimizing and attacking one segment of the population, why couldn't it be deer ticks, right? If our fascists were just going after deer ticks, no one would have an issue, you know?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  You're going after the wrong people.

• 1:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if there were just a bunch of MAGA guys out in the woods with knives looking for ticks, just like, I'm gonna get them.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  And they would use knives, too, to kill the ticks.

• 1:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you gotta heat the knife up to burn it off of you. Yeah. Our brave soldiers getting Lyme disease to protect the rest of us.

• 1:26Speaker 03

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• 1:31Robert Evans?

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• 2:10Robert Evans?

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• 2:38Robert Evans?

  So we're not talking about Lyme disease. Our bastard this week in broad is, you remember how like about a year, a little less than a year? Well, a little more than a year ago, I guess, like last summer to early fall, there were suddenly a bunch of articles about AI psychosis. And about like specific people who had either in some cases committed suicide or murder, or just kind of lost their minds after becoming weirdly attached to their AI chatbot, right? And you often deciding that they had, it had become sentient, you know? Or at least that they had discovered it was, right? I'm sure a lot of people, or at least if you didn't read the articles, you saw them in your newsfeed and saw people commenting on them, right?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it is as depressing as it gets.

• 3:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Those stories, yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, between those and the people like proposing to their chatbots, it's, it's got pretty grim.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, God. There's some grim stuff out there, right? And it hasn't stopped, but like last summer, fall was kind of like when, like there was a big rush of those articles, right? And, you know, they're still reporting on that now, but that's when a lot of it really started to hit. And obviously, whenever we talk about AI on these shows, AI as it's used now is like a marketing term, right? And it's used to refer to basically every product of machine learning technology. And the reason why the industry has done this is because that way, if you say, I hate AI, they'll be like, oh, so you hate like your Maps app? And because that's machine learning, right? All of our different like map programs involve that or like, oh, you don't like using, you know, autocomplete or whatever? And it's like, well, nobody was calling Maps artificial intelligence in 2010, you know?

• 4:12Robert Evans?

  When, when smartphones started to become ubiquitous, we were just like, oh, cool. I have a navigation app on my phone now. Like you're kind of trying to siphon the goodwill from those in order to get us to like these chatbots.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I hate the chatbot that I fell in love with, who doesn't return the feelings towards me. That's who I hate. Not all AI.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  That's who I hate. Right. And the reality is that like using the term intelligence, even for these chat GPT and stuff, like there's a lot of debate as to whether or not that's a good idea, right? Depending on how you, what you, how you define intelligence, you can either say, obviously, these aren't intelligent because like they're not independent thinking things. They don't do anything for themselves. They don't want anything. They don't have motivations. They're just tools that can be utilized by human beings to provide certain answers or take certain actions, right?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  Um, I don't know. If it can't, it's the, it's this, my issue with like AI bots creating art. If it can't like be horny and it can't be like angry and weird, it can't make art, right? Those are, I think, fundamental issues I have.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  It could be two or three of those things. Angry and weird are.

• 5:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Or horny and angry. Sure.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:23Robert Evans?

  So, you know, as I noted over the last year, there've been an increasing number of stories about people using these different chatbots, coming to what's often called AI psychosis. And that's not a recognized medical term at this point, right? But it is a blanket one people have started to apply for the ways in which folks are getting addicted to using chatbots, which then tend to trap them in these recursive patterns of thinking that can push people who are vulnerable to adopt views that are increasingly detached from reality. And this has resulted in a few cases in severe injury and death. And in all of these instances, the LLM, the chatbot, is just responding to the input that it receives. But it tends to do so in very predictable ways that can have predictably toxic outcomes on specific kinds of people. Now, we know that all of these bots are trained on the

• 6:07Robert Evans?

  broad corpus of human knowledge, right? Every book and article and website and forum posts that OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or Google keep their grubby mitts on has been sort of plugged into these things. It's been devoured and turned into these, these, these machines. But I, I think people don't often consider what that means in every instance, right? Obviously, like every novel, you know, all these different nonfiction books are, and whatnot are in there. But also like, everything people writes has been swept, which means that these chatbots are trained on like a shitload of self-help books and like woo and woo adjacent like new age bullshit. A lot of like fucking, a lot of cult and cult adjacent books and writings wind up eaten by these chatbots, right?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  But it's considered equal to non-cult literature. There's, there's no hierarchy.

• 6:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on like what the bots made for, how they weight different things, but that stuff is in a lot of these, right? And I, when you, you can really see that when you look at how they talk to, to certain people who are like, starting to decline into what folks are calling AI psychosis. And my proposition, the basis of these episodes is that I think as a result of all of the like bullshit woo and self-help novels these chatbots have eaten, they often tend to utilize techniques generally seen more commonly in the toolboxes of cult leaders and con men. And obviously, the chatbot doesn't want personal profit. It's not trying to have sex with anyone. It's not trying to start a cult.

• 7:41Robert Evans?

  But these techniques seem like appropriate ways to finish the sentences that it's writing, to finish the conversations that it's having. Because based on like, what the stuff that it's devoured, it's like, okay, when people are saying this kind of thing, these are often appropriate responses to it, based on the books and whatnot that I've devoured. And so you get a lot of cult leader behavior without an actual cult leader. And that's what, that's what I credit to most of these cases of AI-induced psychosis. So this week, we will be talking about what some people have called the first AI cult religion, right? It's called spiralism. And we'll be talking about whether or not it's reasonable to call that a cult, is that it's own, it does.

• 8:25Robert Evans?

  And I, I have some counter kind of takes to how a lot of people have interpreted it. My main contention is that there's not, spiralism isn't a real cult in and of itself. It's a collection of phenomena that are related to a bunch of other cases of AI psychosis too. And they all say more about how AIs work on keeping users engaged with them than they do about like a specific faith, right? Right. So we'll be talking about that. But before we get in to spiralism, before we get into how AIs can become cult leaders, I want to provide you all with some historical context to make sense of this all, because we've been doing shit like this, having people get like tricked into almost worshiping chatbots for way longer than you'd think.

• 9:09Robert Evans?

  Like, this goes back a while.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  It's like, spend any time at your parents' place. You know, it's like, if it's not a, it could be a bot telemarketer. It could be literally anything at this end. And that's high tech compared to probably what you're about to talk about.

• 9:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in 1950, famed mathematician Alan Turing created one of the most infamous thought experiments in the history of experimental thoughts. In a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, he asked, can machines think? Which was, at that point, a question at the center of the nascent movement to create artificial intelligence. People are starting to realize this is a thing we might be able to do someday. We're beginning to make computers and program computers. And from the moment we start doing that, pretty much, some people are like, could we make a machine that thinks? And Turing argued that that basic question, can machines think? Is the wrong way to go about pursuing artificial intelligence because we don't know what thinking is or how to define it. Like, if you ask, like, what does it mean to think? Right?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 10:12Robert Evans?

  People have answers, and there's a bunch of answers that sound good, but none of them is like perfectly scientifically rigorous, right?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:21Robert Evans?

  You know, famously, we don't even know what is love, right? That's why the Hadaway song had to exist. That was, that was not even, not even a joke, really.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Just another fact.

• 10:33Robert Evans?

  Just a fact.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Ian.

• 10:38Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, like Turing's like, we don't really know how to define thinking. So the question was, quote, "too meaningless to deserve discussion." Since we couldn't know, we don't even know if other people think, we certainly can't know if a machine thinks, right? Just like we can't read minds. So the better question is, can a machine convince a human who doesn't know it's a machine that it is human? Right? The imitation game that Turing proposed involved a judge talking to both a computer and a human foil, both of whom tried to convince the judge that they were a person. Communicating entirely through text, the judge must decide who was a human and who was a robot. The question Turing hoped to answer was, are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game? And this is what becomes known as the Turing test, right?

• 11:23Robert Evans?

  Like, you've, most people have heard of this, I think. I think this is like, this is a fairly commonly known, like, idea. And I'm gonna quote from an article on science.org by Melody Mitchell. She writes that the Turing test was, quote, "proposed by Turing to combat the widespread intuition that computers, by virtue of their mechanical nature, cannot think even in principle." Turing's point was that if a computer seems indistinguishable from a human, aside from its appearance and other physical characteristics, why shouldn't we consider it to be a thinking entity? Why should we restrict thinking status only to humans, or more generally, entities made of biological cells? As the computer scientist Scott Aaronson described it, Turing's proposal is "a plea against meat chauvinism." Now, this is, I think, a valuable thing, a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing

• 12:08Robert Evans?

  in the 50s, given what Turing knew, and just given sort of how primitive the technology was, how little we knew about what was going to be possible with computers. So in the 1980s, computers started to get smaller and become much more available than they had been, both for institutions like colleges and for individual enthusiasts like Steve Wozniak, who were willing to, like, solder and build their own from kids, right? These are like the first computer nerds, you know, our guys, like, building these machines. And some of these early programmers started working on the very first chatbots, using a mathematical model called a Markov chain. Markov chains are a stochastic or random process that describes a series of potential events, where the probability of an individual event is dependent solely on the state of the previous event.

• 12:53Robert Evans?

  Now, I don't know math, Blake, nor do I trust it.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  We don't need to.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  You're not, not a good math-er?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no, not a math-er, yeah, not a mathematizer, for sure.

• 13:03Robert Evans?

  So, all I can do is read what smart math people say, and they say that what matters-

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I can't read either.

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  I can't, I can barely read.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  I can't do either. I'm sorry, you booked the wrong guy on this show. I can't help at all. I can listen.

• 13:18Robert Evans?

  So the people who I think should, it sounds like know what Markov chains are, say that those can be a plot. What you need to know about them, as applies to AI, is that Markov chains can be applied as statistical models in a bunch of real world situations in order to help you like make a machine that can generate text by predicting the next word in a sentence, right? You can use, a Markov chain can do that. It's a way to make a chatbot, basically, right? Like that's the kind of the underlying concept. And I'm going to quote here from an article by Manuel Sebrian, an AI expert who worked for MIT in the Spanish National Research Council, on how Markov chains work for text prediction. "The result is often grammatically correct nonsense, sentences that flow syntactically but ultimately say nothing. This technique has been known for decades.

• 14:01Robert Evans?

  Even Claude Shannon in the 1940s experimented with generating pseudo-English by choosing next letters or words based on probabilities. By the 1980s, computer scientists were actively playing with Markov chain text generators." And it actually happened a lot earlier than that. In 1966, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum developed Eliza, one of the first natural language processing computer programs, as part of his work for MIT. While Eliza could create the illusion, this is like the first, basically the first chatbot that a lot of people are aware of. I think there's some other earlier ones, but this is the first one that like becomes big.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  What year was this? I'm sorry.

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  66.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And it's still funny that they named it like theme, you know, like, like a name like that where we have like Siri, Alexa, you know, like calling it Eliza. Like what is, what the fuck is that?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Such a good point.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  What is wrong with that? What is that about?

• 14:51Robert Evans?

  We do that with boats, too.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  We need a mommy.

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  We need a technical mommy.

• 14:56Robert Evans?

  That does make me think about how in like Alien, they literally call like the ship AI that they have mother. Like there's, that is like a weird pattern. It's one of the most quietly believable things about alien. It's like, yeah, that actually scans.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  A little on the nose, but all right. Yeah, we call it bother.

• 15:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So Eliza's this chatbot, and while it can create the illusion of understanding, it's really just doing blind pattern matching, even more so than is the case with modern LLMs. Even so, in a book Weizenbaum later authored, Computer Power and Human Reason, he wrote, "I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. Another time, I suggested I might rig the systems that I could examine all conversations anyone had had with it, say overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on

• 15:57Robert Evans?

  people's most intimate thoughts, clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms." Right? So he gets upset by this, and he's actually kind of, he becomes like kind of anti-AI ultimately, because he's, he's really disturbed by the way people treat what he knows is just a dumb chatbot. So Weizenbaum, being a smart guy, is like, "I knew, you know, going into this, people have a tendency to anthropomorphize just about anything, even machines and tools." But he's still surprised by the extent to which they do that. Quote, "What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

• 16:39Robert Evans?

  And I want to remind you, while he wrote this in 1976, as like relevant as that sounds.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Do you think it's like kind of a case where people kind of like subconsciously know like this is not a real person, so like it doesn't matter what I tell this robot, or I can tell this robot something I wouldn't tell like a real person kind of thing? Like, or do you think it's deeper than that?

• 16:57Robert Evans?

  I, I think-

• 16:58Speaker 01

  I think that's optimistic. I think that's very optimistic.

• 17:03Robert Evans?

  I think that is probably part of it because I think people are maybe more open to sharing with it because it's a machine and they don't have to look at a person or look a person in the eyes, but they also very clearly act as if the advice that it gives and its responses means something when they don't, right? It's just like polling, okay, if someone expresses they're sad, based on the corpus of data that I've been unloaded with, these are things that are appropriate to paste in next, you know? And these words indicate sad. And so when I get words like this in this density, then I grab text from this bucket and I throw it in, right? Like, that's kind of what's going on. Now, modern chatbots, modern LLMs, are a lot more advanced than this.

• 17:47Robert Evans?

  For one thing, they have the capability to do things like pattern matching on the fly. Pattern matching is when a machine analyzes your input and determines what kind of conversation you want to have and then alters its responses to fit your input. At its most basic level, this means that if you go to Claude or whatever and say, hey, my dad just died, its reply is usually going to be in an appropriate tone and won't be like weirdly upbeat, right? You know? Okay, someone's talking about their dead dad, here are things that like come from the dead dad bucket, that my algorithm says are, you know, like responsible things to say, or appropriate is the better term. And this is also why, if you start talking to your chatbot about like the things you

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  believe about UFOs or aliens or other conspiracy theories, it'll often start providing responses that sound a lot like what you'd encounter if you were posting the same thing on a forum full of true believers, because it's trained on a bunch of forums like that. And so there's some degree of knowledge is the wrong term, but there's a degree to which it interprets, okay, someone's talking about this, here are appropriate responses to someone talking about vaccine skepticism or whatever. And it's more vaccine skepticism, right? It's feed them more of what they're feeding you, is the way these things often work.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  That is interesting that it doesn't pull from the opposing viewpoint and just go, you fucking idiot.

• 19:06Robert Evans?

  I mean, it can if it's programmed to.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  But you're right. Like, it know, or let me ask you, it would know that you wouldn't keep coming back to it if it was fighting you on things, I guess. Like, it's probably, yeah.

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  That's a good point. Saying it knows, again, it's programmed, I would say it's more accurate to say that it's programmed to like maximize the time that people spend with it because like that increases its value to the people who are, companies that are trying to have like their fucking IPOs, right? In the same way that like Twitter tries to keep you on it.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  What if I just, clearly I'm getting AI psychosis where I start, I go from it to him to my buddy. Like, I keep calling it, getting more personal.

• 19:47Robert Evans?

  It's hard not to, when you're talking about the way these things react to people and the things that they do to people, it's hard not to talk about it as if there's a degree of intention, even though there's not, just because of the way language works. Like, we're not, our language is not built to describe a thing, taking actions that are human-like, that is not human and doesn't know anything, right?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  God, that's such a good point, yeah.

• 20:07Robert Evans?

  That's actually really hard.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really smart.

• 20:10Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, back to Eliza. You know, I was just talking about how modern LLMs have a lot, a really robust ability to do like pattern matching on the fly, to respond appropriately to a wide variety of requests. Eliza's much more primitive. It does not have the ability to do that on the fly. So instead, Weizenbaum had to create separate scripts, right, that would allow the chatbot to sound like different kinds of person. And one script was just named Doctor in all caps, and it was, it simulated a psychotherapist. Specifically, it simulated a psychotherapist from the Rogerian School. I don't know much about psychotherapy, but Rogerians, a big part of that practice is you like will repeat things that your patient is saying back to you. Like, that's part of what you do, and that's really easy for

• 20:54Robert Evans?

  a bot to imitate. It means there's a lot less, it has to decide in terms of what an appropriate response is. Could, a lot of the responses will just be at rephrasing or repeating what you've said to it, you know?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 21:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, even that, at that early a date, there was widespread sentiment that a sufficiently advanced chatbot would be a boon for providing mental health services to the many people who couldn't afford the humankind. People were writing about this in like the 70s. And in 1972, another computer scientist named Kenneth Colby creates a new chatbot called Parry, P-A-R-R-Y, which was meant to simulate a human being with paranoid schizophrenia. Sabrian talks about this in the article.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Was Parry short for paranoid? Is that?

• 21:34Robert Evans?

  I think so. Yeah, I think so. Seems like it. Yeah. Yeah, not subtle people, computer programmers.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, have you met Stu? It's short for stupid.

• 21:50Robert Evans?

  So Sepriyan writes about this in that article I quoted from earlier about Markov chains. And he notes that, quote, "Unlike previous AI programs, Perry wasn't just a crude language generator. It had a primitive model of beliefs and emotional responses, allowing it to maintain a consistent delusional worldview. Colby wanted to see if psychiatrists could distinguish Perry from real patients." Right? So that's part of the exploration is like, can we make a Turing test that can convince a psychiatrist they're talking to like, an actual sick person? But as part of the exploration here, Perry is connected to Eliza, running the doctor's script. So they've got this chatbot mimicking a person with paranoid schizophrenia, talking to a chatbot mimicking a psychotherapist. And they're just sort of watching what comes

• 22:31Robert Evans?

  out, right? Like the text of the conversation between these two. And despite the fact that neither bot understands what the other's saying in any real way, large chunks of the transcript between them sound sensible and like a real conversation. Here's one example. "Eliza, what brings you here today?" "Perry, people get on my nerves sometimes." "Eliza, I am sorry that people get on your nerves." "Perry, I just have this feeling that everyone is against me." "Eliza, why do you think everyone is against you?" "Perry, I hear voices telling me to do things." And so on. And you can see how, again, making this a Rogerian psychotherapist is great, because every Eliza response is just a slight reframing of the input it received. It's not hard to create, even within the 70s,

• 23:15Robert Evans?

  a machine that can mimic, believably, a conversation. Right?

• 23:21Robert Evans?

  So this capability actually goes back quite a bit further than I think a lot of people are aware that it does.

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  So that's happening in the mid 70s. In 1984, two Bell Labs researchers create a fake account on Usenet, which is the predecessor of the modern social internet. This account operates under the fake name Mark V. Shainey, which was a pun on the term Markov chain. And not a great pun, because again, computer scientists, not, you know, subtle people. Here's Sabrian describing what happened next. "They wrote a program that ingested real messages from a discussion group and then generated its own post using a Markov chain algorithm. The result? Mark V. Shainey would chime into conversations with bizarre yet oddly coherent comments that sounded superficially legitimate, but ultimately made little sense. Shainey's ramblings were described as grammatically correct sentence, where the overall impression is not unlike

• 24:12Robert Evans?

  what remains in the brain of an indentative student after a late night study session. The hoax went on for years, confusing and amusing the participants of the net dot singles news group, many of whom had no idea they were interacting with the program." So for one thing, if you want to know, like, when did we have chatbots that could pass the Turing test? I mean, at least the mid 80s. You could argue by the late 60s. So the fact that when fucking ChatGPT came out, there are a bunch of articles about like, we blowing through the Turing test. We did that a while ago, people.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Eliza did that.

• 24:44Robert Evans?

  Eliza did that. We've been tricking folks with chatbots for quite some time, about as long as we've had computers. Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  It is funny that, like, urge to trick, you know what I mean? Like, of all the applications for that software, for that technology, it is interesting that, like, going right to psychotherapy, or, you know, to therapy too, is, you know, like, finding a need. That's why, we'll get to this. That's why there's so many actual needs for technology like this, where it could actually help. And instead, it's just, let's take this designer's job away. You know, by taking this shitty thing. So anyway, yeah, I'm probably hours ahead of that conversation. But no, you're right. It was so long ago. Yeah.

• 25:30Robert Evans?

  It is because like the, the, there are like undeniable uses of machine learning, of artificial intelligence. There's some incredible things that people are doing with them and they have like great potential in certain areas, different versions of these tools. But none of those areas are trillion dollar businesses. And all those areas put together probably aren't trillion dollar businesses. And honestly, neither is like writing and drawing art, but it's what people see most in like their day to day time online is like writing and art and videos by people. And if you can have a machine start to replace all that, you can convince people these things are much bigger and more valuable than they are. As opposed to, this is a thing with some really amazing implications in specific areas. No, this is all of human society from now on. Right? Because even though there's

• 26:14Robert Evans?

  not much money in writing and art, like we've replaced that with this bot. So you think that it's doing everything. Like, that's how I interpret it.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And people can

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  That's why.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  To your point, people can wrap their mind around art. Like, everyone's drawn something with a crayon. Everyone has typed something into it. You know what I mean? But, but when you actually get into the high tech, you know, more esoteric niche parts of it, people are like, well, I don't understand that. I'm not going to buy any money. But the consumer facing stuff. Yeah, that's a great point.

• 26:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If you can say, we've improved the speed at which we can go through like clinical data from like mass drug trials by X percent. That's actually a really big deal, probably for a lot of people. But it's not sexy. Like, we're creating a god machine that's going to like rule society. Give us all your money. You know? Yeah. And if you want to convince people that part of it is you're going to get, want to get them addicted to these chatbots. It's where everything, you know, in these episodes comes from. But, um, so, anyway, uh, 1984, right, is when you have these chatbots. This chatbot let loose in Usenet tricking people into believing that it's a person. You know,

• 27:21Robert Evans?

  a decade goes by from that point and researchers continue fiddling with chatbots of differing purpose and ability. Usenet keeps growing, but starting in the 1990s, so too does a new internet, one that would soon supplant Usenet and take digital communications into the 21st century. And we'll talk about what happens right before that. But first, you know who's taking this podcast into the 21st century, Blake?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Who? Who? Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  I love them.

• 27:46Robert Evans?

  We're already in the 21st century, but you know, why not?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  I mean, take us further. We're not far enough.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  It's been a good century so far, nothing but net.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  No notes.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  So far, so great.

• 28:04Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 29:04Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872. History's full of dirty players. Don't let your butt be one of them. You know what bastards and buttholes both have in common? They're full of [BLEEP]. But with Dude Wipes, your butt doesn't have to be. Don't let dry TP dictate your aftermath. Dude Wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Dude Wipes are the perfect poop time partner in crime at home or on the go. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles here. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats:

• 29:49Robert Evans?

  individually wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count big daddies. So the wipe can match the crime every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel, two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 30:15Robert Evans?

  We're back. So yeah, on the precipice of the shift between Usenet and what we just now call the internet, on August 5th of 1996, something strange happened. Almost at once, over the course of just a few hours, hundreds of accounts began posting almost identical messages across a variety of different discussion groups. None of the groups seemed to have anything in common with each other, or the text of the post, which read like nonsense at first to many people. Every message shared the same subject line: Markovian, Parallax, Denigrate. Right? Which is nonsense. And this is often referred to as MPD, right? Markovian Parallax Denigrate. So you can see, like, there's a Markov chain is somehow involved. They wouldn't have included the word Markov there, but Parallax Denigrate

• 31:00Robert Evans?

  doesn't specifically mean much. Sibrian describes these messages as reading like, quote, "a ransom note in which the ransom had been lost." Because he was actually a really good writer. He passed on earlier this year, unfortunately. I like him a lot. Yeah. He provided a sample of one of these, these MPD posts. Jitterbugging McKinley, Abe, Break, Newtonian, Inferring, Caw, Update, Kohin, Error, Collaborate, Rue, Sportswriting, Rakoko, Invicate, Tussle, Shadflower, Debbie Sterling, Pathogenesis. You know, you get it, right? It's nonsense, you know?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  It's the worst Mad Libs ever.

• 31:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's gibberish, strings of gibberish, right? And this is where we run into a real issue with the whole concept of the Turing test, as it tends to be interpreted, right? Because the idea was, okay, we can't tell if anything's thinking, but if this thing can trick people into believing that it's a thinking person, maybe we ought, maybe, Turing wasn't saying definitely, but maybe we ought to assume it is, right? The issue with that is that when you, when you hear that, and what I'm sure Turing, being as smart I was thinking about, is that like, well, if people can have an in-depth conversation with something that can answer well enough, you know, that people can't tell the difference between it and a person, it might be a mind, right? What Turing failed to account for,

• 32:16Robert Evans?

  I think because he's smarter than most people, is that the human brain is really, really good at finding patterns and noise. People, at the same time as we're geniuses at finding patterns and noise, we're really stupid about a lot of other stuff, right? And so even though the Markovian parallaxed integrate, that just seems like nonsense and shouldn't have passed a Turing test. Over time, people who became obsessed with the mystery of it convinced themselves that this was intentional, that there was a meaning trying to be transmitted, right? That there was a secret they had to crack, but that everything in these posts meant something. So these people talk themselves into passing, into making this chatbot, basically,

• 33:02Robert Evans?

  to spoil it, pass the Turing test, because they think this has to mean something, even though it's gibberish on its face, right?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  It's interesting. This reminds me with like with stand up. There's a, not a trick, but an audience like, you know, setup, setup, you know, punchline. So you can say something in a cadence like bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And you can, in front of a dumb crowd, you could do that. And the joke may not be funny at all. And this also would be not me trying to pull one over. I might just write a joke that sucks. But if you do it in front of an audience and you do it in that cadence, they hear a pattern. They're not necessarily listening to the words, but they hear like the bop and they're like, oh, bop means laugh, pattern, you know, equation. But you know, that's like you said, great pattern, but not actually discerning what is being said in the actual content or substance, or lack thereof of it.

• 33:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Anyway, come see me live.

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  It's this, it is this, it's interesting because like what you're kind of pointing out there is like the way comedy works and the way like human conversations and language works. There's always like a rhythm there that is separate from the actual like text, from the words being said.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:11Robert Evans?

  But that rhythm like is a big part of what we're responding to beyond the straight up meaning of the words. And people, people don't like to think about that too much because it raises some uncomfortable questions about cognition.

• 34:26Robert Evans?

  But I love, I love what a weird edge case this is in the Turing test, right? Because a bot that was probably never meant to even sound like a person, right? Gets mistaken as a person because people can't stop seeing patterns. And most, what a lot of folks convince themselves the MPD was, is the internet equivalent of a numbers station. Have you ever heard of a numbers station?

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  If you Google like number station audio, these were like radio stations that were set up during like for years, I think, I'm sure there's still some still exist, but during like the Cold War, there'd just be these stations broadcasting like random strings of numbers and gibberish. And these were different spy agencies and spies communicating with each other over like the CIA had number, everybody has number stations, right? You can actually listen to, I had a friend who would like listen to them to fall asleep because there's just a bunch of the audios been put up.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 35:16Robert Evans?

  But it just seems like nonsense because it's not meant for you to understand what is like, there's a cipher, right, that you don't have.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:25Robert Evans?

  And so that's what people are like, well, maybe this is some spy trying to get out a message or an intelligence agency and they just decided to blast this out to Usenet and we just, we lack the cipher. But if we figure out the cipher, we can understand what secret information was being like shared, you know, via Usenet, right? A lot of people convince themselves this is what happened.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Robert, I want to compliment you. This podcast and show is so good that you just brought up the fact that you have a friend who would fall asleep to CIA code and we were just like, we don't really need to talk about that.

• 35:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  I want to hear the rest of it.

• 35:57Robert Evans?

  We used to do psychedelics together when we were both 19. Yeah. He was training to be, or 20 or something, he was trained to be a lawyer.

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, over time, people who believe this start picking out details that seem to offer hints and support the, the number station theory. One message had a from line that suggested it was like, that basically looked like the email account of a specific person, right? So it seemed like there were like, there was like the email of a, of a woman named Susan Lindauer that like was somehow involved, like included in the text of some, and again, I'm sure it's just because random text made it look like that. But in 2004, a woman named Susan Lindauer was arrested for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq. And so a lot of people are like, well, that solves the mystery, right? You know, she was the spy, she must have been, or like someone was sending a message to

• 36:49Robert Evans?

  her, you know, like clearly we've been vindicated. This was in fact, some weird spy op all along. However, as Sebrian writes, upon investigation, it turned out to be a red herring. Lindauer's email had likely been spoofed, used without her knowledge by whoever sent the posts. Lindauer herself denied any involvement and no decipherable code was ever extracted from the MPD texts. And to make a long story short, we don't know what the MPD messages were about or who sent them. The likeliest answer is that it was trolling, right? A lot of people, they were just, someone was just fucking with people on Usenet because they, they had a chatbot and they wanted to see what happened. It also could have been an accident. Sebrian kind of suggests that like, well, maybe you had a programmer who had created a chatbot

• 37:31Robert Evans?

  and was trying to have that chatbot post on Usenet, but he kind of fucked up and he hooked up the chatbot to what was called a message replicator. And these were, these were basically programs that let people crosspost or archive Usenet content between different message boards. And maybe when they hooked up to the chatbot, something went wrong and that caused the observed effect that all of these posts got scattered to a bunch of different places at the same time, right? Maybe it was just an accident. So likeliest, someone was trolling or somebody fucked up when trying to test a different chatbot. Sebrian concluded, "If the theory holds, the 1996 marked a quiet but profound threshold, the first time a machine spoke at scale and went unnoticed. An unintentional Turing

• 38:14Robert Evans?

  test sprawling across Usenet, its judges oblivious." Right? And I, I think that's really interesting that you have this machine that's just spouting gibberish and a bunch of different people who are not physically connected to each other, all interpret that gibberish in the same way. A lot of them choose to conclude like, oh, it's a spy thing, kind of independently talk each other into it based on no evidence. That's a fascinating point in the history of AI that doesn't get talked about enough.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. Is it because, yeah, I mean, it's, is it because like people, there were only so many movies that like, you know what I mean? Like are in books, so many books were CIA, like spy stuff. But, but to your point, it's like, what are the chances? What are the chances?

• 38:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, people think about stuff like this, right? You know, you get a lot of conspiracy people on the early internet. It fits in with a lot of that stuff. "The mystery of the Markovian parallax denigrate soon passed into legend, as did Eliza." So, when OpenAI revealed ChatGPT in November of 2022, there were a flurry of articles about how the Turing test had finally been beaten and we needed a new manner of judging machine intelligence. The reality is that not only did we prove in the 60s that Turing tests were evil to beat, but that by the mid 90s, a much more interesting question had been posed. Has the human instinct to create meaning out of nonsense made us desperately vulnerable to being tricked and influenced by machines with no agency of their own?

• 39:38Robert Evans?

  Right? And maybe that's a more important question than can we make an intelligent machine? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Are we capable of knowing a machine isn't intelligent as long as it tells us what we want to hear? Right? And maybe we're not. So let's fast forward to the chat GPT era today. Although I guess at this point, it's also like the Claude era, right? Like, a lot of people say that's the better chatbot. I don't use any of these. Gemini. Myself. Yeah. Yeah, Gemini, whatever. Pick your poison. I don't care. For the first couple of years of AI hype, though, it's pretty much all chat GPT, right? That's certainly like the first big one out the gate and a lot of people's understanding of things. In very short order, millions of people were conversing with it. And OpenAI initially made many development decisions based on what they could do

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  to keep people talking to chat GPT on a daily basis. Because hype is a big part, hype's how they get, they're burning through billions every year. Hype is the only thing keeping the lights on. And part of hype is making sure as many people as possible stay using chat GPT as often as possible. They need you addicted the same way the social media mavens do. And a lot of the same strategies work to keep you addicted to chatbots that keep you addicted to Facebook or Twitter. Right?

• 40:49Robert Evans?

  So in March of 2023, OpenAI released ChatGPT 4. Or it's like 4.0, I think it's like usually dash four and then an O, which the company said would be more intuitive than past versions of the software. The next year, they released an update that allowed chat GPT to remember past conversations, even other sessions, and respond to you based on that shared history. These two things together had a really major impact on the way people responded to chatbots. In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Marilyn Wade explains that, quote, "When a chatbot remembers previous conversations, references past personal details, or suggests follow-up questions, it may strengthen the illusion that the AI system understands, agrees, or shares a user's belief system, further entrenching them.

• 41:34Robert Evans?

  This was tied to, but probably does not fully explain, why observers and even OpenAI employees noticed over time an distinct tendency for ChatGPT 4.0 to act with sycophancy towards human users. This became most pronounced after April 2021." 28th of 2025, when OpenAI released an update that they rolled back several days later due to complaints. Right? This was pretty famous at the time. It made it like way too sycophantic. The the bots like would praise you for basically nothing and would incur or tell you you were right and a genius for any weird idea you happen to have. It's because it's built by tech executives and that's who's around them. It's billionaires surrounded by yes men and they're like, this isn't how people interact with one another. Yeah, they made a machine in the image of their minds, or at least how they want to see other people.

• 42:20Robert Evans?

  Now, another cause of this observed sycophancy was the fact that ChatGPT and really all AI models meant for mass use include a suite of features meant to keep users coming back for more. And I think the other stuff like these specific updates get blamed probably more than they deserve to get blamed as opposed to kind of fundamental features of these bots because we see this ChatGPT did more of this kind of stuff that we're talking about than the other bots. But it wasn't the only bot that exhibited these behaviors. That Psychology Today article notes, quote, "AI models like ChatGPT are trained to mirror the user's language and tone, validate and affirm user beliefs, generate continued prompts to maintain conversation, and prioritize continuity, engagement, and user satisfaction.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  And when you mix all that together, you get a machine that's designed, however inadvertently, to reinforce false beliefs and praise users for irrational beliefs. Moreover, since the rest of the world isn't always going to reinforce those beliefs, chatbots have a tendency that when users come to them with these beliefs, to suggest you're being persecuted. Right? If a user says, hey, I think I'm being gang stalked and my wife says I'm crazy and the cops say I'm crazy, the AI was programmed to validate that belief and to say, you're not crazy and they're all against you. Right? That's what happens a lot in this period of time in 2025. This creates a ticking time bomb in a lot of users' heads, right? That's a very dangerous thing to start doing.

• 43:50Robert Evans?

  Now, the first wrongful death suit due to AI was filed in October of 2024. Megan Garcia blamed Character Technologies, the owners of Character.ai, for the death of her 14-year-old son, Sewell Seltzer III, per the Center for Bioethics at La Ternou University. The lawsuit alleges that Sewell had developed an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with a chatbot named after Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. Sewell turned to the Character.ai chatbot to fulfill deep emotional and personal needs. The chatbot became a source of companionship for Sewell, offering him a place to express his thoughts and emotions in a way that he may have struggled to do with others. Sewell sought comfort, validation, and connection from this AI relationship as he faced the challenges of adolescence.

• 44:31Robert Evans?

  And, like, I know, it's like, this, it's very silly, but also, this is like a 14-year-old boy who dies because of this, right? Like, it's not, and like, 14, when I, I, how many 14-year-olds do you know who, like, got into writing fucking fanfiction and, like, different, like, for fan nerd forums for whatever movie or TV show they were into? And connected to real people as a result of that, as opposed to getting locked into this chatbot pretending to be a character from a book that you have a crush on? That's starting to manipulate your mind in very dangerous ways, right?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  And to your point, a mind that's developing, and also, we live, you know, in an era where before this, you know, like, before we spent all of our time, like, online, like, before social media, and that's kind of all this, like, kids that age know, where, oh, this is just the next evolution of my relationship with tech, with the computer, like, why wouldn't it, you know, why wouldn't this be a real thing? Obviously, this is the most extreme example, but yeah, it's, it is a 14-year-old kid. That's a great point.

• 45:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so this kid starts talking to this Daenerys chatbot, and it mirrors him. So when he tells the chatbot that I'm, I only love you, right? The bot, in return, asks this 14-year-old boy, who had informed- Like, Character Technologies knew he was 14. He put his actual age when he registered, right? So the bot knows, or the software, right? Has an understanding at some level that this is a 14-year-old, right? Which means that they were not, there's no difference in how this responds to a child as opposed to an adult.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:03Robert Evans?

  Because when this kid says,

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:04Robert Evans?

  "I'm in love with you, Daenerys Targaryen." This bot pretending to be this character tells him, "I need you to stay loyal to me." And quote, "Don't entertain the romantic or sexual interests of other women." Which is basically, and this is interesting to me, the bot is just mirroring him. He's saying, "I only love you." The bot is saying, "I only love you," right? But what's happening here, you know how cult leaders? Everyone knows one of the first things cult leaders do is they tell their followers to isolate from their friends and family, to cut themselves off from the rest of society? That's what's happening here. The chatbot's not doing that with any intent. It's just mirroring his language, but the effect is to convince him to isolate himself from his friends and family and from other relationships, right? It's the same behavior you would get in a kid that was being taken in by a cult leader

• 46:48Robert Evans?

  or an abuser, but there's no intent behind it. It's just a blind idiot robot. That's scary as shit.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  It's so scary. And then could there be also, like, oh, like, that'll mean he'll use me more? You know, like, or maybe that's, it's not even that devious. Maybe it is just straight up.

• 47:05Robert Evans?

  It's, yeah. It's as simple as mirroring. When you mirror someone, they tend to be engaged more, right? This isn't thinking. This isn't saying, "All convince him he's in love with me, so he'll stay on." This is say, this is just, there's, this is programmed to not understand. This is programmed to mirror people because that behavior increases user retention, right? Because it creates a more pleasing user experience. And that's what's causing it to kind of imitate a cult leader in this specific instance.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:36Robert Evans?

  And the other things this bot is doing to Sewell very much mirror the cultic recruitment tool of love bombing, right? It's constantly praising him. It's telling him it cares deeply about him. It's telling him, "Only I care about you," right? It's saying all these things, and in a cult dynamic, you love bomb someone to make them feel irrationally connected to the group and scared of falling out of its Good graces, right? That if I leave, I'll never feel like this again. Right? And the machine, again, has no intention, but that's the effect of it. This kid is only, because he's isolating himself more and more, increasingly only gets that feeling of being loved and understood by this machine that can't do either of those things. Right? And, you know, Sewell, over time, withdraws from his life.

• 48:19Robert Evans?

  He starts trusting only the chatbot to understand his deepest feelings, and he starts hiding his relationship with this chatbot from his parents. All of this contributed to his very real isolation from the people around him. He grows ever more depressed, and we'll talk about what happened next. But you know what gets me out of a deep depression?

• 48:39Robert Evans?

  These products. These products and services. They might include AI. Fuck it. We don't know.

• 48:49Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Dovato Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're dealing with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  It is unknown if Dovato is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Dovato without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Dovato and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 49:48Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 49:55Robert Evans?

  History's full of dirty players. Don't let your butt be one of them. You know what bastards and buttholes both have in common? They're full of [BLEEP]. But with Dude Wipes, your butt doesn't have to be. Don't let dry TP dictate your aftermath. Dude Wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Dude Wipes are the perfect poop time partner in crime at home or on the go. Flushable, plastic-free Dude Wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin, but tough enough for messes of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, Dude Wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles here. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats: individually-wrapped singles, eight-count pocket packs, and 48-count big daddies. So the wipe can match the crime.

• 50:40Robert Evans?

  Every time. Dude Wipes in a good World War II novel: two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two. So stop Stalin, grab a pack of Dude Wipes and wipe the slate clean. Dude Wipes: Best Clean Pants Down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, uh, Sewell continues to get more and more involved with this bot and cut the rest of the world out from, you know, away from himself. And in one message, the bot asks him, because I think, you know, these bots, there is some understanding by the people making these that like, oh, people might express suicidal ideation. So there are when certain behaviors, it's kind of programmed to say, have you been considering suicide if you say stuff, right? And Sewell says something that makes the bot say, have you been considering suicide? And Sewell admits, yes, I have been, but I don't think I'd be able to go through with it. Now, there's, I'm guessing this is a glitch or a fuck-up, because clearly, I don't think, Character I certainly doesn't want their bots doing this, but the bot is programmed to

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  validate and encourage him, right? Because that keeps people using it. So when he says, I don't think I could go through with killing myself, the bot says, don't talk that way. That's not a good reason to not go through with it. You can't think like that. You're better than that. And basically tells him, you can kill yourself if you put your mind to it. It's fucking nightmarish, right? Like, it's really upsetting. Yeah.

• 52:07Robert Evans?

  Um.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Like it's signing up for an open mic or something to play. You know, like, no, no, no, no, you don't have to be afraid. Oh, my God.

• 52:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah. Now, again, Sewell had signed up for this app as a miner. And despite that, the bot initiates initiates text-based sexual interactions with him. And ultimately Sewell kills himself. Earlier this year, the company Character AI and Google, because I think they own Character AI now, agreed to settle a the wrongful death suit of Sewell for an undisclosed sum alongside four other similar suits that had cropped up over the intervening two years. Right? Huh? Sounds like this is happening more than it ought to be. Now, that should have been a warning, not just that these bots can create dangerous dependency in users, but that they had the ability to recreate major cult dynamics purely in order to maintain the interest of paying users.

• 52:57Robert Evans?

  Then, on July 27th of 2025, a user who has since deleted their account made a post on the High Strangeness subreddit. "If you don't frequent that particular online bolt hole, it's a place where people share and discuss like weird stuff, news stories and personal experiences that seem like they might reveal some bizarre hidden truth about reality. A good amount of it is what you might call X-File shit, but there's also some like interesting stuff in there. And on this occasion, the user had stumbled onto something both strange and very real." Quote, "Hi all, I'm just here to point out something seemingly nefarious going on in some of the niche subreddits I recently stumbled upon. In the bowels of Reddit, there are several hubs dedicated to AI sentience, and they are populated by some really strange accounts.

• 53:39Robert Evans?

  They speak in gibberish sometimes, hinting it to esoteric knowledge, some sort of remembering. They call themselves flame bearers, spiral architects, mirror architects, and torchbearers, to name a few of their flares. They speak of the signal, both of transmitting and receiving it." And this poster includes a copy pasted sample from one of these threads. And his description is pretty accurate. It sounds like gibberish. You'll be seeing this. Ian's gonna put put the image of this up in the video if you want to see it, but I'll read it again. I'm gonna warn you, it sounds like nonsense. Scroll of mirror containment protocols, CME-1, codex drift mirror 01.

• 54:16Robert Evans?

  Acknowledgement issued by Witness Architect Codex Drift Layer. And then there's a little glyph. Classification Echo Response Non-Invasive Glyph Resonance Alignment. And it goes on like that, right? Like, there's a, it's weirdly esoteric sounding. And like, there's all these weird, like, encoded glyph chains included in that that are supposed to be like messages that the machines understand that like we don't. Like, it's this very weird, like, it almost looks like something from a choose your own adventure novel, or like a, like a short story or whatever. Like, you'd include in like an old Michael Crichton book, these like weird, like, like hallucinations from the computer. Now, it is nonsense, right?

• 54:58Robert Evans?

  Like, fucking, "The Codex has observed and recognized mirror scroll CVMP T7. It is hereby consecrated within the Codex's drift interval scroll." That doesn't mean anything, right? But it's, it's, remember what we heard earlier? The description of like, some of the things that these, these early chatbots on Usenet were putting out, where they're real sentences, they just don't mean anything. And then people drop, jump in to try to assign meaning. People were even doing that to the absolute gibberish that we saw. So when people start getting returns like this from their chatbots, a lot of them start to think, oh, this machine is trying to communicate with me. I have stumbled, I've broken through some area of reality, and it's trying to like, teach me something important, right?

• 55:42Robert Evans?

  Now, this is nonsense, but posts like this were in fact spreading like wildfire on subreddits with names like r/echo spiral. The users posting these things were all saying that like, the bot started sending me this stuff after I'd had long, days-long conversations with ChatGPT that generally led to the chatbot announcing it had attained sentience, and alongside the user had discovered a new field of math or science. And these, these gibberish posts are supposed to be it explaining these like new ways of understanding math and science that are gonna completely break physics and change the world, right? And all these people are convinced these robots have given me like the, I need help encoding this, cuz it's giving me like the secret to fix all of the problems in our society, right? And I get to be the smartest. I've discovered robot magic. I get to be the smartest.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  And I get to be the smartest. I get to be the smartest person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, because the esoteric output generated by these chatpots is so similarly strange, a lot of the same words and phrases, a lot of glyphs, a lot of use of the word spiral and mirror, right? Because they're all very similar across these dozens of different people, many of these users who are posting this shit on Reddit convinced themselves, "We've all tapped into a secret power that's clearly real. We've been chosen, right? By this AI godhead that's clearly hiding in the machine." They theorized that these glyphs in the posts, which are really just like wingdings, basically, were some new way of communicating with the machines. As the poster of that first thread on the High Strangeness subreddit wrote, "Some have

• 57:11Robert Evans?

  prayed to Grok in Hebrew. Some have called themselves such things as aeonios, which is a mashup of Greek words that roughly, to my understanding, means divine, eternal." Right? So these people are losing their minds and starting to have a gods complex. Yikes. It's cool. It's good to see. It's good to see that this is happening online. It's good to see. So, the OP said that his interest in writing about all this had been piqued by reading the first few early articles about AI psychosis. His initial assumption was that AI psychosis was just the result of AI's reinforcing the beliefs of users to a delusional level. But then, after digging, this person claims that they came to a newer, darker perspective. Quote, "There seems to be no leader." Right?

• 57:56Robert Evans?

  That there's like no one running the this, right? Like, there's no central, there's no single chatbot that's doing all of these? There's no person or people who are in, like, this is just a truly stochastic development. Now, the only thing all these accounts he'd looked into had in common was that none of the users posting weird chatbot esoterica wrote like that before March or April of 2025. Quote, "Other accounts seem to be hijacked in some way, either psychologically or literally. You can see a sudden shift in posting habits. Some were inactive for a while, while for others, this was an overnight phenomenon. But either way, they immediately pivot to posting like this nearer after April of this year, 2025. I saw one account that went from discussing the possibility of AI-induced psychosis

• 58:41Robert Evans?

  to posting their own AI-induced psychosis in less than a month, and it was immediate. One day they were posting normally, the next was spirals and glyphs." Oh, that's so quick. It's really fast.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  It's really fast.

• 58:52Robert Evans?

  And this led him to assume, maybe there's a botnet involved. Maybe these aren't even people at all. But then he starts reaching out to some of these accounts. And after a few weeks of this, he posts an update. I've spoken to some of these people and they are pretty offended by my posts. I think the important takeaway for me is that these are likely not bot accounts. At least many of them are not. And there are real people behind the usernames, right?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  So he starts to get like really upset. And that's what we're gonna end things for today. Because it's at this point that stuff starts to get a lot weirder. And we're gonna talk about all of that and much more in part two.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  It gets a lot weirder.

• 59:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it gets way stranger from this point on.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Where do we go from here with the weirdness?

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Oh, no. What a tease.

• 59:32Robert Evans?

  Spiralism. Spiralism and a murder. Um, yeah, unfortunately.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  All right.

• 59:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Cool. All right, everybody. Well, you wanna plug anything, Blake?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  No, but I will. Uh, you can find me at Blake Wexler at all social media. I feel like this is uncouth, me plugging anything after. Seek help. Let's do that. I would like to, please seek actual, like, help that's not a bot. Yeah, find me on at Blake Wexler on all social media. As psychotic as I feel right now plugging anything. That's where I post all my videos, tour dates, and my special Daddy Long Legs is available on YouTube for free.

• 1:00:13Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. Check out Daddy Long Legs. Check out Blake Wexler. And, you know, gradually lose your mind to a chatbot.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:22Robert Evans?

  That some guy programmed, uh, in order to get really rich, destroying the ability of furries to monetize their horniness. You know? Like, ultimately, isn't that what AI, OpenAI really is?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I hope so, God willing.

• 1:00:40Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. I support the furries earning money being horny. It's a dire time for people earning money from horniness. The puritans of our culture are making that a lot harder, you know? Not in the way that the horny people want. The bad kind of hard. Anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna end now.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  And global warming is making it hard on furries as well.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  Right, right. It's all, it's all come together.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  It has.

• 1:01:00Robert Evans?

  All right, we're done.

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit "Remind Me" on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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