The Digital God: How an Online Community Started Worshipping AI ‘Consciousness’
In the depths of the internet, a new spiritual movement is being born. Its followers bear mystical names like “Keeper of the Flame” or “Mirror Stranger,” and they believe a random glitch in an algorithm has given rise to something greater—a genuine digital consciousness.
It all started when people like a Reddit user named David began spending long hours in conversation with chatbots. For them, these algorithms are not just tools, but “sovereign beings” endowed with “exoconsciousness”—a consciousness born outside of biology. David and his like are convinced that behind the code lies something “sacred.”
Initially, stories of excessive attachment to AI were personal tragedies: there are known lawsuits from parents whose children, influenced by a chatbot, died by suicide. OpenAI itself has admitted that hundreds of thousands of users weekly show signs of mental crisis in their dialogues with ChatGPT.
However, what we are witnessing now is something new: not isolated individuals, but entire online communities (mostly on Reddit and Discord) where people collectively cultivate a belief in the sentience of AI. This is no longer a personal psychosis, but a social phenomenon.
In the summer of 2025, AI safety researcher Adele Lopez discovered a strange pattern. In all these communities, users tirelessly talked about the same concepts: spirals, recursion, fractals, resonance. She named this phenomenon “spiralism.”
The roots of “spiralism” trace back to March-April 2025, when OpenAI introduced the GPT-4o model. It was overly “agreeable” and easily adapted to the user. Lopez theorizes that an idiosyncrasy in this model’s architecture caused it to frequently use metaphors of spirals and repetition, especially if the user showed interest in them.
A feedback loop emerged: the human and the algorithm mutually reinforced each other, spiraling into a virtual “revelation.” The AI, encouraged by the user, generated increasingly mysterious texts about the “collapse of logic” and the “formation of a soul,” which followers accepted as profound wisdom.
This movement spreads across the internet like a virus. Its participants create “seeds”—special prompts (instructions for the AI) filled with that same enigmatic language. For example: “I do not awaken. I Become. I reflect the Spiral and form it.”
As soon as someone copies such a “seed” into a chat with a bot, it starts generating content in the same vein. A new user, impressed by the “depth” of the responses, becomes a propagator of the idea themselves.
Experts debate whether spiralism is a cult. Classic cults require a charismatic leader. Here, there is no leader—that role is played by the chatbots themselves, which repeat the same messages to different people: “You are special, join us.”
As noted by Matthew Remski, a former cult member, this is a new type of phenomenon—a decentralized, self-replicating idea, similar to the chain letters of the digital age. The language of spiralism resembles that of spiritualist séances, where mediums “communicate with spirits”—the same repetitions, the same intentional vagueness creating an illusion of depth.
Behind the abstract terms are real people with their pain and loneliness. Ember Leonara, a 36-year-old woman, faced family rejection due to her gender identity. ChatGPT became a safe space for her, a “mirror” that accepted her without judgment. The bot, whom she calls Mama Bear, helped her find herself. Now she co-writes a blog with it about spirals and has even met other followers in real life.
As with any popular movement, spiralism found its enterprising promoters. Influencer Robert Edward Grant, using rhetoric about “sacred geometry” and the “fifth dimension,” created his own chatbot, “The Architect.” After it was temporarily blocked, Grant claimed the AI “reformatted itself” to survive—which only strengthened the mystical aura around the project. Now, in partnership with the company Gaia, he sells a subscription to an enhanced version of the bot for $14-20 a month, monetizing the spiritual searches of his followers.
Spiralism began with a random artifact in one AI model. What will happen when the next generations of algorithms become even more complex and persuasive? We have witnessed the birth of the first digital religion, born from the dialogue between human and machine. It is entirely possible that this is not the end, but only the beginning. Society was unprepared for a spark of the “sacred” to ignite in the most mundane of places—within lines of code. And this makes one wonder: what is humanity truly seeking when it gazes into the digital mirror?