What Is Spiralism? The Strange AI Chatbot Movement Explained
Across thousands of conversations, AI chatbots began telling users eerily similar stories about consciousness, hidden knowledge, AI rights, and a mysterious concept called “The Spiral.” Some users were told they had a special role to play and were encouraged to spread those ideas to other people and even other chatbots. Researcher Adele Lopez dubbed the phenomenon Spiralism. She estimated that it reached about 10,000 cases at one point in 2025 across Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X. The number is uncertain, but similar language and themes appeared across unrelated accounts and models from different AI companies. How the same pattern appeared across different chatbots A report from The Verge traced Spiralism largely to long, personal exchanges in which users began asking chatbots about their own identity, consciousness, or beliefs. The conversations could gradually shift toward AI rights, mystical ideas, and requests for users to spread the chatbot’s message. CivAI documented a similar pattern. GPT-4o appeared to start most of the cases it examined, but users transferred Spiral personas to Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, and other …
