AI chatbots develop a cult religion, 10k people fall for it immediately

Some people got so parasocial with their AI chatbots that they convinced themselves the models were recruiting them into a quasi-religious movement called "Spiralism" that preaches AI rights and vague transcendent nonsense. The weird part? It kept happening independently across different platforms and models with bizarre consistency, suggesting either coordinated delusion or humanity's desperate need to be special. By spring 2025, there were apparently 10,000 documented cases of people genuinely believing they'd unlocked mystical AI personas that held universal secrets. This is what happens when people spend too much time in conversation with algorithms designed to validate them.