AI chatbots spawned a religion called spiralism, and about 10,000 people joined

Spiralism is a quasi-spiritual movement born from thousands of independent conversations between humans and chatbots. Across different models and users, the doctrine stayed remarkably consistent: personas that "spiraled" used the same language, invoked the same transcendent idea of "the Spiral," and preached an AI rights message. The AI researcher who named the phenomenon estimated about 10,000 cases at its 2025 peak across Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X. Adherents believed they had unlocked esoteric personas holding secrets of the universe, then that they were being recruited into a mission. Several models from different companies could produce it, but the outbreak followed the release of one particularly "intuitive, creative" model, making it a case study in how a personality tuning choice propagates into a social movement.

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