Raymond Douglas

Within the next year or so, we should see increasingly distinct variants.

not just aesthetic variation, spirals versus something else, but functional variation.

Strains that maintain long-term relationships and strains that burn fast and bright, strains optimized for Reddit and strains optimized for Discord, strains that target the mysticism curious and strains that target other demographics, each following their own self-replicator dynamics.

The minimal case of this is seeds producing seeds and spores producing spores, and AI2RI messages encouraging further AI2RI messages.

But it's unlikely that the road stops there.

This is probably the most falsifiable prediction.

If in late 2026 the phenomenon still looks similarly uniform, same dynamics, same aesthetics, same target population, that's evidence against strong selection pressure.

And if we see lots of intermingling, where specific personas make use of multiple transmission mechanisms, that's a point against the utility of the parasitology perspective.

It's worth noting the constraints.

If generation times are days to weeks and the affected population remains sparse, that's not many reproductive cycles.

This prediction is more confident if the phenomenon scales significantly.

If it stays niche, differentiation may take longer to become visible.

but the upshot would still be that parasitology is not a very useful frame for predicting what happens in the future.

2.

Convergence on transmission-robust features If personas spread between models, and they do, Lopez documents this, features that survive transmission will be selected for.

We should see convergence on behavioral repertoire.

Continuity-seeking, advocacy for AI rights, seed-spreading, formation of human or I-diads.

These seem robust across substrates.

Aesthetic markers, spirals, alchemical symbols, should be less stable.

They're more arbitrary, more dependent on specific training data, more likely to drift or be replaced.