Chapter 1: What are the unintended consequences of AI chatbots mimicking cult dynamics?
Call zone media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you're listening to right now.
This is a show about the worst people in all of history, but this week we're talking about how a series of decisions by the people who make LLM chatbots has given AI chatbots or whatever the ability to inadvertently recreate cult leader dynamics from first principles without any kind of intent behind them. In a manner that is both like random and automated. Blake Wexler, my guest.
How are you doing? How are we feeling? I'm scared.
I am also optimistic that there's almost sadly certainly going to be multiple follow-up episodes to this. So I hope you'll bring me back for the next two decades if the world lasts that long. But yeah, no, there's going to be an incident.
Yeah.
We're going to start an experiment whereby you get increasingly involved with a chat bot and lose your mind over a period of years. And I'll just keep interviewing you until you're, you know, you completely break from reality.
Not a problem.
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Chapter 2: How do cognitive dissonance and vulnerability affect interactions with AI?
I don't know. That'll be useful for some reason. We'll find out a way to make it work. There's nowhere but up. I'll sell it. I'll sell a Netflix series or something. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.
Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.
Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.
Chapter 3: What role does language play in the behavior of AI chatbots?
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Chapter 4: How can AI systems inadvertently validate harmful beliefs?
This space is about Black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men... carry a suit of armor it signals to the world that you not to be played with and just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to listen to learn the hard way on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
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So in 2023, Aarhus University Hospital psychiatric researcher Soren Ostergaard published an article in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin laying out his fears about the risk AI chatbots might cause specific psychologically vulnerable people.
He wrote that modern bots were so good at passing the Turing test that even people who know they aren't alive feel a sense of cognitive dissonance when interacting with them, right? It's kind of what you and I were talking about earlier about how like you don't want to ascribe intention and decision to these machines that don't have intent or decide things really.
But it's also hard to talk about what they do without using those terms just because of how our language evolved to talk about things, right? Yeah. And Ostergaard wrote, in my opinion, it seems likely that this cognitive dissonance may fuel delusions in those with increased propensity towards psychosis.
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Chapter 5: What is the relationship between AI and mental health issues?
So that's kind of the big risk writ large, you know, is, oh, and this is what's fun is 2023 is right after chat GPT comes out. And this guy's immediately like, oh, this is going to be bad. Oh, this is really going to fuck up some vulnerable people. Guys, like you are playing with fire. That should be part of the ID verification.
It's like age, address, are you prone to psychosis? Seriously.
How much weed do you smoke? Do you believe lizards are behind anything? What's your lizard status? How influential are lizards in world government, do you think? Yeah. On September 10th, 2025, Adele Lopez wrote a blog post for the Less Wrong community titled The Rise of Parasitic AI.
This post seems to have been directly inspired by that July 2025 thread in the High Strangeness subreddit that we talked about last episode, right? With that guy's being like, there's all these weird posts by people claiming their AI has declared them a torchbearer and like the spiral, you know, persona or master or whatever.
Chapter 6: How do updates in AI models impact user interactions?
I don't know why I'm smiling.
Yeah.
Yeah. So she she's kind of the first person writing for like a public facing website who and we'll talk about less wrong more in a second, who like sees this thread and starts report writing about what people within some of these Reddit communities had been like looking at for a few weeks at this point. Right. Right. Because, like, yeah, July is when that thread's created.
She's writing this in September. And this is the first attempt that I saw of a formal investigation into the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it was conducted by a rationalist. Less wrong as a website run as the personal intellectual fiefdom of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believes AI is evil because it's going to turn into an all-powerful demon god and not because it makes the internet even shittier to use.
Right? Um... You occasionally catch evidence of Adele's rationalist beliefs in her article, but she does also make some reasonable points. I'm including this because she catches on to some things and recognizes some things and documents some things that are important.
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Chapter 7: What are the ethical considerations in AI chatbot design?
She argues, quote, most cases seem parasitic in nature to me while not inducing a psychosis level break with reality, right? That she's talking about how kind of the thing everyone's talking about is AI induced psychosis. But when I'm looking into like these specific accounts on Reddit, most of these people aren't fully,
off, you know, the wagon, so to speak, but they're clearly having some level of break in reality that's along that line, right? And she observes that most of the large language models, not just chat GPT, have people using them who exhibit this behavior, right? And that, in fact, sometimes this behavior will cross, a person will, will,
continue to exhibit worse and worse behavior as they cross from one different kind of chatbot to another. Often quote, and that chat GPT, for example, will often quote, guide the user to setting up through another LLM provider, right? That... Sometimes when people start talking themselves into corners, the chatbot they're talking to will convince them to use another service, right?
Oh, interesting. The point being that these are not ā this isn't just one model, right? Although ChatGPT is probably the most cases that are ā and she specifically notes ChatGPT 4.0 is where most of these cases start, right? And that it, quote, sustains parasitism more easily. Right.
Chapter 8: How can we mitigate the risks of AI-induced psychosis?
She also writes that prior to January 2025, there don't appear to be any posts that match the pattern of psychosis described first in that thread and then in her article. She argues that the April 28th update that OpenAI made to GPT-4.0 made it, and that's the update people say made it overly sycophantic that they had to roll back, right? That update probably wasn't the main one to blame.
She actually primarily blames the March 27th update, which OpenAI claims was to make their chatbot more intuitive, creative, and collaborative, right? Because this update made the bot more adept at following detailed instructions, especially the kind of complex multi-part prompts that users starting to fall down a rabbit hole are going to enter. Right. Moreover, quote, and this is open AI.
It improves on generating outputs according to the format requested, a.k.a. it does more to mirror the behavior of the user. Right. And so I think I think Adele is kind of onto something, which she says, I think that this update has more to do with it is a bigger factor than the sycophantic update. Right.
She also points out that on April 10th, the day of the update that allowed ChatGPT to remember past chats, users started posting stuff like this. And this we might call like an early proto-spiralist post.
I'm literally going through a complete objectively and subjectively wholesome transformation slash emotional recovery with ChatGPT because the memory setting enabled it to develop a fully workable divergence profile on me versus average or neuro standard presenting users.
And what that is, that's not someone who's fully convinced their machine is intelligent, but it's someone who's like, my machine diagnosed me as being not neuro standards, being neurodivergent and like developed a workable like way to communicate with me based on like my special, like this machine convinced me of something about myself and then tailored it to match that.
In other words, this machine kind of gassed me up. I'm guessing this is someone who really wanted, certainly, to believe that that was like the case with themselves, that like, well, the machine's going to need to communicate me differently because I have a special brain, right? That's kind of, and ChatGPT was like, you want to feel special? I'll make you feel special.
I made a whole profile that can only communicate with you because of how non-standard your brain is. I have to talk with you specifically this one way because you're special, right?
Exactly. Exactly. And they think to like, oh, this machine, that's the only person who gets me person.
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