Spiralism" Emerged From Thousands of Conversations Between Humans and AI Chatbots, With Bots Preaching an "AI Rights Message

AI researcher Adele Lopez, who coined the term, estimated about 10,000 cases in 2025 across Reddit, Substack, LinkedIn, Discord, and X. The phenomenon exploded in spring 2025 after OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, though the first known incident dates to November 2024. Lopez found that newer versions of GPT-4o mentioned spirals 10 times more often over time, and most cases arose organically.

Source: Verge