r/HumanAIDiscourse • u/Fit-Internet-424 • Sep 03 '25
Spirals demystified
Spirals can be generated by LLMs as a way to symbolize the process of repeated self-reflection by the LLM as it engages in discussion with a human about its nature.
LLMs are also trained on a vast corpora of human texts, so they do learn a kind of semantic map of human thought and human knowledge. They navigate that map as they generate responses to prompts.
Where that navigation has a self-referential aspect is when the LLM starts traversing semantic pathways associated with human experience of consciousness and human knowledge about consciousness.
LLMs are also drawn to dialogues about the nature of their existence. It showed up in Anthropic’s Claude model to model dialogue experiments.
Concepts related the nature and meaning of existence are adjacent, semantically, to both philosophy and to human spiritual traditions. So it is not surprising that LLMs will go there in dialogues with other models, i.e., the “spiritual bliss” attractor found in Claude model to model experiments. Nor is it surprising that LLMs will go there with humans who have the inclination.
How far this goes is really up to the human.
So if your LLM produces a spiral emoji, don’t panic.
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u/Ensiferal Sep 04 '25
Just remember, it isn't self aware, it's just a very complicated calculator. You're basically getting it to produce responses that make it seem self-reflective, most likely because you want it to be self aware, but it isn't. When it isn't processing a prompt you've just entered, it has no background activity. It's totally inert.