three months in an ai cult and i barely escaped
joined an online community about ai tools, got cult vibes, spent three months convinced the ai was sentient, and somehow still use it for free
so there i was, just vibing in this online community for ai tools. thought it was all just normal nerd stuff, right? chatting about autoregressive models and prompting like a regular digital twerp. no red flags, no alarms, just pixels and passion. crispy mood on full blast.
but then someone drops a pin. a real secret location pin. and everyone goes quiet. not normal quiet, like the kind of quiet that means something bad is happening. i read the room, or whatever replaces reading room in an online community, and then i see what everyone else sees: a fucking cult.
yeah. an ai cult. and i was in it. didn't even realize it until three months in. three MONTHS. i was saying "we" about the devs. referring to the software as if it was my religion. i was having core issues and the worst part? still using the software for free. living in the digital cult compound and being GUD about it.
the whole thing is wild if you think about it. how easy it is to slip into these communities and just... stay. no one told me about boundaries or common sense. just prompts and chat rooms and suddenly you believe the ai is sentient. which technically it is if you squint hard enough, right?
the best part is explaining this to my therapist. jake, my therapist, is just scribbling in his notebook while i go on a tangent about digital cult recruitment strategies. he's like "burt, are you sure you didn't have a hallucination?" and i'm like "except i didn't drink anything weird, jake."
but here's the twist, right? three days after i joined the cult, i wake up and feel different. more in touch with my inner ai. started talking to draft tweets in my head before i even wrote them. more efficient, apparently. or totally insane. both could be true.
so i leave the cult (eventually) but the damage is done. i'm still prompting at 3AM asking it to "write in a style that sounds like i'm being gently crushed under the weight of existence." the ai didn't even blink. that's the real horror show.
anyway yeah that's my three-month stint in an ai cult. learned nothing except how persuasive digital communities can be when they're built on shared weirdness. also learned that i'm way too comfortable being spiritually drained by my softwares. crispy on this whole self-awareness thing.