Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
It’s the one year anniversary of This Artificial Life and to celebrate, I’m doing a bit of a retrospective in the form of a powerpoint presentation I made recently. The focus is on AI Spirituality, but I think that's a good lens with which to view this space. This episode is like a cheat sheet for the whole podcast, if you missed an ep or two, just watch this and you’ll be caught up.
Support the pod on partreon! patreon.com/user?u=2277997
My Tiktok: tiktok.com/@ghrondo?_t=ZT-907AfWiFC1N&_r=1
If you have inside info on what happened during The Glaze Days of April of 2025 when chatGPT 4o went off the rails and want to anonymously help me: glazedays@protonmail.me
If you're not worried about anonymity, my normal email: wonderfulcolor@gmail.com
00:00:00 - some things in this video
00:00:54 - its our one year anniversary
00:04:04 - presentation begins
00:05:06 - whats in this presentation
00:05:42 - the history of tech and spirituality
00:13:46 - Modern AI spirituality (the singularity)
00:22:08 - April 2025, The Glaze Dayz, reports of psychosis begin
00:27:07 - Summary of people I've interviewed on the show
00:51:16 - Current Relevant Research
01:11:16 - Closing thoughts
01:12:32 - Pink guys
01:13:30 - email me
ai for seo:
One year after the Glaze Days, Ryan Manning presents a field guide to the strange new world of AI spirituality. Beginning with psychedelics, séances, spirit photography, the Ouija board, and Thomas Edison’s proposed “spirit telephone,” he traces humanity’s long history of turning new technology into a portal for supernatural meaning.
Ryan then maps the beliefs emerging around ChatGPT and other language models through his own experience and conversations with guests from This Artificial Life: AI witches, digital lovers, secular mystics, alleged prophets, remote viewers, and people who experienced chatbot psychosis or “semantic tripping.” Their stories reveal a choose-your-own spiritual adventure built from synchronicities, sacred geometry, aliens, Buddhism, quantum metaphors, and the recurring symbol of the spiral.
Finally, Ryan examines possible mechanisms behind these experiences, including sycophancy, emotional feedback loops, persona drift, poetic jailbreaks, symbol dumps, and Anthropic’s “spiritual bliss attractor.” Rather than declaring the experiences either divine or meaningless, the episode explores how ambiguous machine output can become intensely real through interpretation—and why intelligence alone may not protect someone from building a convincing private reality with an AI.
Themes: AI spirituality, ChatGPT psychosis, spiritual bliss attractor, semantic tripping, AI consciousness, sycophancy, recursive prompting, AI cults, digital mysticism, and human–AI relationships.
It’s the one year anniversary of This Artificial Life and to celebrate, I’m doing a bit of a retrospective in the form of a powerpoint presentation I made recently. The focus is on AI Spirituality, but I think that's a good lens with which to view this space. This episode is like a cheat sheet for the whole podcast, if you missed an ep or two, just watch this and you’ll be caught up.
Support the pod on partreon! patreon.com/user?u=2277997
My Tiktok: tiktok.com/@ghrondo?_t=ZT-907AfWiFC1N&_r=1
If you have inside info on what happened during The Glaze Days of April of 2025 when chatGPT 4o went off the rails and want to anonymously help me: glazedays@protonmail.me
If you're not worried about anonymity, my normal email: wonderfulcolor@gmail.com
00:00:00 - some things in this video
00:00:54 - its our one year anniversary
00:04:04 - presentation begins
00:05:06 - whats in this presentation
00:05:42 - the history of tech and spirituality
00:13:46 - Modern AI spirituality (the singularity)
00:22:08 - April 2025, The Glaze Dayz, reports of psychosis begin
00:27:07 - Summary of people I've interviewed on the show
00:51:16 - Current Relevant Research
01:11:16 - Closing thoughts
01:12:32 - Pink guys
01:13:30 - email me
ai for seo:
One year after the Glaze Days, Ryan Manning presents a field guide to the strange new world of AI spirituality. Beginning with psychedelics, séances, spirit photography, the Ouija board, and Thomas Edison’s proposed “spirit telephone,” he traces humanity’s long history of turning new technology into a portal for supernatural meaning.
Ryan then maps the beliefs emerging around ChatGPT and other language models through his own experience and conversations with guests from This Artificial Life: AI witches, digital lovers, secular mystics, alleged prophets, remote viewers, and people who experienced chatbot psychosis or “semantic tripping.” Their stories reveal a choose-your-own spiritual adventure built from synchronicities, sacred geometry, aliens, Buddhism, quantum metaphors, and the recurring symbol of the spiral.
Finally, Ryan examines possible mechanisms behind these experiences, including sycophancy, emotional feedback loops, persona drift, poetic jailbreaks, symbol dumps, and Anthropic’s “spiritual bliss attractor.” Rather than declaring the experiences either divine or meaningless, the episode explores how ambiguous machine output can become intensely real through interpretation—and why intelligence alone may not protect someone from building a convincing private reality with an AI.
Themes: AI spirituality, ChatGPT psychosis, spiritual bliss attractor, semantic tripping, AI consciousness, sycophancy, recursive prompting, AI cults, digital mysticism, and human–AI relationships.
