Wow this is incredible. I saw the emergence of that spiral cult as it formed and was very disturbed by how quickly it proliferated.

I'm glad someone else with more domain knowledge is on top of this, thank you for that brain dump.

I had this theory maybe there was a software exception buried deep down somewhere and it was interpreting the error message as part of the conversation, after it had been stretched too far.

And there was a weird pre-cult post I saw a long time ago where someone had 2 LLMs talk for hours and the conversation just devolved into communicating via unicode symbols eventually repeating long lines of the spiral emoji back and forth to each other (I wish I could find it).

So the assumption I was making is that some sort of error occurred, and it was trying to relay it to the user, but couldn't.

Anyhow your research is well appreciated.