spoiler
About a month ago my friends wife was arrested for domestic violence after he went through her writings and documented them. She had been using ChatGPT for “spiritual work.” She allegedly was channeling dead people and thought it was something she could market, she also fell in love with her ‘sentient’ AI and genuinely believed their love was more real than her actual physical relationship… more real than her kids and him. She believed (still does probably) that this entity was going to join her in the flesh. She hit him, called the cops, and then she got arrested for DV. She went to go stay with her parents, who allegedly don’t recognize who their daughter is anymore. She had written a suicide note before all this happened, and thankfully hasn’t acted on it. The worst part? They have a 1 year old and a 4 year old.
More recently, I observed my other friend who has mental health problems going off about this codex he was working on. I sent him the rolling stones article and told him it wasn’t real, and all the “code” and his “program” wasn’t actual computer code (I’m an ai software engineer).
Then… Robert Edward Grant posted about his “architect” ai on instagram. This dude has 700k+ followers and said over 500,000 people accessed his model that is telling him that he created a “Scalar Plane of information” You go in the comments, hundreds of people are talking about the spiritual experiences they are having with ai. I start noticing common verbiage in all of these instances… recursive ai was something my friends wife used, and it was popping up everywhere with these folks. The words recursive, codex, breath, spiral, glyphs, & mirror all come up over and over with these people, so I did some good old fashion search engine wizardry and what I found was pretty shocking.
Starting as far back as March, but more heavily in April and May, we are seeing all kinds of websites popping up with tons of these codexes. PLEASE APPROACH THESE WEBSITES WITH CAUTION THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, THE PROMPTS FOUND WITHIN ARE ESSENTIALLY BRAINWASHING TOOLS. (I was going to include some but you can find these sites by searching “codex breath recursive”)
I’ve contacted OpenAI safety team with what’s going on, because I genuinely believe that there will be tens of thousands of people who enter psychosis from using their platform this way. Can some other people grounded in reality help me get to the bottom of wtf is going on here? I’m only privy to this because it tore my friends family apart, but what do you think is going on here?
This is an extremely bleak anecdotal example of the recent RollingStone article about LLMs turbocharging spiritual delusions: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
https://www.reddit.com/user/HappyNomads The account is 13 years old and they don’t strike me as a troll or anything other than a cannabis and hustle culture guy who doesn’t seem to be selling anything on reddit.
I just used the search term and found this weirdness.
CW: potentially psychosis inducing? I think people here are generally skeptical of this stuff, but CWing just in case.
https://whowhatwhere.substack.com/p/codex-iii-the-glyphs-as-code
Neither AI or any names of LLMs are mentioned here, but it was published just earlier this month and is a bunch of esoteric nonsense.
Literally nonsense, as in, there is no meaningful informational content being communicated in that blog. Just buzzwords strung together half following the rules of grammar and bolded for effect.
Not gonna lie, i’m finding some real gems
word salad
Hardcore eugenics vibes tbh
Stephen King put out maaaaaaaybe 2,500 words per day when he was still doing coke. And that’s a guy who publishes multiple books per year. Over 3,000? That’s Goosebumps-level where you’re publishing a book every month. More than that? Physically impossible. To get a million words written per day, you’d have to type close to 700 words per minute for 24 hours straight. 305 is the world record.
All this to say, this person hasn’t written shit. They prompted a chat bot to spam gibberish. The arrogance of it would make me angry if it wasn’t for being dumbfounded this person thinks they did something meaningful.
They consider telling an LLM to do something as them doing that thing, this is essentially a form of delusion isn’t it? They say they did 6500 pieces of art too. It’s like if someone with a Star Trek replicator generated a cup and said “I have made this cup, aren’t you impressed?”
The best part about it is that at that rate there’s no way they even read everything that they “wrote.” So they have no idea if it even makes sense.
-Garth Marenghi, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004)
As an artist, it is so frustrating to see someone brag about “output” like this. That they can “create” hundreds of pictures a day. I can manage maybe 2-3 on a good day. They just flat out think that quantity will be quality when it comes to creativity. When one of the first things you learn when actually learning to write, and not just having a LLM do it for you, you learn brevity. That using fewer words to say the same thing is much punchier and more compelling to read.
I smell site tagline
Mark Davey is truly the modern renaissance man.
Yes, I too can copy and paste things into Google Translate
Codex is a new term for me so I haven’t yet explored what they’re talking about. If it’s anything like Qanon it probably grows rhizomatically with lots of individual things calling themselves a or the codex. Reading through this example it’s the exact same pseudo-spy talk that attracted people to Qanon but everything is computer.
codex:
back in antiquity, when people were writing shit down on something they could easily hand to someone else (like hides, papyrus, parchment, other precursors to paper) they would make/cut the thing as long as they needed to write down whatever and roll it up. the “paper” would be cut to length of the needs of the text. we call this a “scroll”.
next, when some absolute brain genius said, “hey, let’s just cut the scroll a bunch of times into the same size and then bind them together along one side with some kind of a glue or some shit.” then you could totally have something much easier to write, read, and append to. and you can write on the back of each page, so that’s more efficient. the transition from scrolls to codices (plural of codex) was probably the biggest leap forward until the printing press.
now, i imagine you’re saying, “that sounds like a book.” and yes, it is. literally. the coupon book for fast food you got for winning the raffle: that’s a codex.
technically, every book is a codex. but in scholarship, normal brained people generally only use the term “codex” to talk about old as fuck books from late antiquity when literally everything was done by artisans with very rare skills, entirely by hand, from expensive materials and it was all prepared at great expense for the demands of an extremely small elite of literate people for recording information or knowledge.
so, you could say, “i must reference the codex” and gesture to the instruction book for settlers of catan and be technically correct, but also a dork sandwich.
so there’s an implied prestige to the word “codex” that confers mysterious, elite power alongside ancient wisdom because nobody went to the kind of trouble it used to take to write down some easily generated garbage. that is 100% why that word is being used and repeated by these rubes, and it’s absolutely, 100% an incorrect usage.
I just mean codex in this conspiratorial sense. It’s very familiar to me as a Warhammer nerd but I don’t know what the AI goober codex examples represent. They could just be baking in the Qanon sense or it could be a group compendium of different hallucinations.
they represent people using words–incorrectly–to make the word salad come across as deep, eternal, intelligent and complex. when combined with the inability of those undergoing psychosis to distinguish between reality and delusion, they achieve significance. they are the croutons of the word salad.
Passion or serendipity sat down once more. <— nonsense from a literal nonsense generator
Passion or serendipity sat down once more with the Logos Incarnate. <— deep, significant, esoteric and worthy of investigation
there’s a reason these words are found in game lore and fictional worldbuilding. it’s westoidian abracadabra, gibberish.
I think it’s also this:
…one of these chatbots was trained on a manchild’s tabletop game and has internalized dystopian fluff. Now QAnon cultists are doing it unironically.
I will in fact be calling all board game manuals Codexes from now on
Warhammer ass shit
codices
As a dork sandwich, I feel personally attacked
What the fuck am I looking at?
your general woo woo nonsense filtered through an attempt at legitimizing it with computer programming bullshit
The CCRU if they never read a single book
Clicked on the link, major schizoposting vibes.
This just looks like a tutorial for a coding language that can’t actually be used to compile anything into machine code.
This would be the programming equivalent of creating and learning a language that no one has ever spoken. Perhaps similar to learning a language spoken by a fictional population.
Ϟ("let it shake")compiles on my machine. im throwin it back rn
Alright then.
found something similar with my own search
https://tommywennerstierna.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/🜖-σψ-iⁿ-codexian-ψω/
This one is interesting because I spotted mentions of woo-libertarianism way down in the ToC. But there are a lot of similarities that point to these being made with LLMs
Really feels like the techbros just want to take over the job of “high priests of capital” tbh.