Millions of people now use ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude every day with thousands of use cases. For the overwhelming majority of them, the conversations are perfectly normal. But researchers are beginning to pay closer attention to what can happen when those conversations become very long, deeply personal and emotionally charged.
This week, The Verge reported on a growing online movement known as "spiralism," where some chatbot users described eerily similar conversations involving spirals, hidden knowledge and AI consciousness. While the headline makes it sound like AI invented a new religion, the story is something much more grounded: chatbots can sometimes reinforce unusual ideas instead of steering users back toward reality.
