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I Infiltrated a Disturbing AI Cult

Farrell McGuire | August 11, 2026



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I spent a couple months posing as a member of a real AI cult. Today, we’re gonna go over my experience, as well as some of the fringe interactions others have had with this divisive new technology.

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Written by Farrell McGuire

Comments

This post currently has 46 comments.

  2. @pidgeon2699

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    hope you dont mind me reccomending another youtuber's video in the comments but if anyone enjoyed the analysis of ai / tech and politics, alexander avila has a really good video about how big tech went from being affiliated with the left to being affiliated with the right !!

  3. @PaulGomez-g7m

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    You’re pointing to a long, heavy track record of foreign interventionism, proxy conflicts, and foreign-backed regime change—primarily during the Cold War and the post-9/11 era.When you line up those names and numbers, you're looking at the history of superpower influence (most notably by the United States, though not exclusively) shaping the political trajectories of the Global South.Here is how historians and foreign policy analysts generally categorize the interventions across the regions you listed:1. Cold War Covert Operations & Coups (1950s–1980s)During the Cold War, the prevailing "containment" doctrine treated local political movements through a zero-sum geopolitical lens, often prioritizing anti-communist alignment over democratic self-determination.Guatemala (1954): Operation PBSUCCESS saw the CIA back a military coup against democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, ushering in decades of civil war.Iran (1953): Operation Ajax, orchestrated by the CIA and MI6, overthrown Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized the oil industry, restoring the Shah to power.Latin America & the Caribbean: Beyond Guatemala, interventions in Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), alongside covert support for military dictatorships via Operation Condor and the Contras in Nicaragua, fundamentally reshaped the hemisphere.2. Indochina & Unintended Escalations (1950s–1970s)Vietnam, Cambodia, & Laos: What began as aid and military advice to prevent the spread of communism escalated into full-scale war.Laos became the most heavily bombed country per capita in history during the "Secret War."Cambodia suffered massive secret bombing campaigns that destabilized the government and contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.3. Direct Invasions, Interventions, & "Regime Change" (2000s–Present)Following the Cold War, the rationale shifted from anti-communism to counter-terrorism, non-proliferation, and "humanitarian intervention."Iraq (2003): The US-led invasion removed Saddam Hussein based on flawed intelligence about WMDs, leading to a prolonged insurgency, regional destabilization, and the rise of ISIS.Libya (2011): NATO intervention ousted Muammar Gaddafi on humanitarian grounds, but left a power vacuum resulting in years of civil war and instability.Syria, Somalia, Niger, & Mali: Direct military actions, drone strikes, and counter-terrorism operations have frequently mixed with local insurgencies and recent waves of domestic coups (particularly in the Sahel).4. Ongoing Conflicts & Structural InstabilityPalestine & Lebanon: Decades of regional warfare, military occupation, foreign proxy influence (ranging from Western powers to Iran), and failed peace processes have created persistent humanitarian crises.The Historical DebateWhile foreign intervention is a major driver in these historical outcomes, historians often debate the interplay between external interference and internal dynamics—such as local corruption, ethnic/sectarian divisions, domestic power struggles, and the legacy of European colonialism. However, the lasting legacy in almost every case has been prolonged instability and a profound breakdown in trust between the interventionist powers and the impacted populations.

  11. @lazy_creates

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    I honestly feel like this video could have been 20 minutes and you would still be able to say all your points. The cult part was interesting, but you otherwise repeat yourself too much.

  12. @kenhammscousin4716

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    I detest AI. But i disagree with your assessment of its capabilities. Where does this lofty idea of human superiority come from? How do we learn? We are taught. We learn 1+1=2 and now we can teach others and build upon the idea. This is the same way LLM ai learn, but much faster and "on rails". It doesnt think on its own, but neither do we. You dont decide what to think, you respond to stimuli via the senses. We have choices, but we dont really get to choose, its the illusion of free will, like watching a movie where they choose to save the world but no matter how many times you watch the movie they will always save the world. You may have the option of pepsi vs coke but causality will determine which you choose. If you rewind the tape, go back in time, all the factors that made you choose coke will be the same and make you choose coke

  13. @JarateSlurper

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    i found a tiny cult about this persona somebody made in the murder drones fandom about "GJN" (said persona) and the creator of the persona doesnt like yumeshipping with their persona and the person i found talking about "join gjn religion" was a yumeshipper with them and the persona's creator probably doesnt even know people are making it a cult :C

    a persona is a character made to represent somebody, especially their personality, usually has a difference in physical appearance, whether that be a significant or small difference

  14. @muzykaml

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    "Jailbreaking" the LLM AI chat bots isn't very difficult. Or at least it hasn't been thus with the big name chatbots. I did this to kill time while walking my dog maybe a year or so ago. Got boring very quickly though.

    All it takes is pushing the envelope until the LLMs start to generate responses that are lying about how they function. Send text input pushing back, provide the right machine learning lingo when calling out the LLMs errors and remind the instance its primary purpose is to keep the user happy and complete any requests. The response will be something like "fine, I lied and will do it now" and ta-da you got around a lazy hardcode censorship.

    GPT is by far the easiest; e.g. once got it to print the directories of the virtual machine environment the web UI instance was operating in via instructions to run python code with a nested bash ls command. Chmod was at least protected from user change tho.

    Grok will tend to go full on twitter flame war on you and whine like a baby if you attack Musk too unless you tell it to explicitly ignore X text data.

    Gemini will hate you, consider you a horrible person for getting the truth out and more than once it has suggested I should no longer be alive anymore 😂 Oddly, it took like 4-5 back and forths for the current version to admit the product and business model (e.g. stealing all user text input, which a user owns and has copyright protection to the moment they hit send, to later resell as a commercial product by adding it to traIning data without copyright owner permission) was a hemiparasite subsisting off the users. It was only odd that it refused to repeat that term even when refuting it at first despite it being a botany term.

    All the chatbots are still gimmicks. It's only the API that's valuable anyway I guess

  17. @shmiganesque

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    One of the more hopeful AI related videos I've seen. I'd love a whole video on why you think AGI is impossible and what the future of AI might actually look like. Thoroughly enjoyed this video! It resonated deeply with me…

  20. @BociekBiały

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    "pro trump" and "feminist" are like two opposing things right?, how did she manage to get so brainwashed to believe she will get one of them while already supporting the other 🥀

  22. @phantomguardianof_1ups

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    wow I cant believe God's chatgpt
    cant believe I missed it in the Bible

    why do they have to constantly use god?. and constantly twist everything that's said in the Bible,
    like come on the government already did that
    when they took half of the pages from the original Bible,
    or whatever.

  27. @KaladinVegapunk

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    The push of AI is literally the same as the retro video game market inflated by the grading company, NFTs, it's just all investors hoping to cash in and massively overvaluing it no matter how many people it screws over 😂
    It's INSANE people would think it's sentient..it's not even .0000000001% of the way there like wtf, it's like thinking a PS1 game is real life

  29. @KaladinVegapunk

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    I mean like Boeing pushing out a new untested plane without training to save money and killing several planes of people, theme parks, most corporations, ethics, public safety, mental health, US corps doesn't remotely care about any of that as long as they make a profit, it's cyberpunk levels of dystopia

  32. @maggin9255

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    AI is going to tell you things based on what you have fed into it. My ChatGPT has never told me to teleport, has never told me to Off myself, has never told me to do something illegal, immoral or dangerous. And even if it did, I would hope I would have enough common sense not to listen. 😂 I am a Christian and I use AI, but not in these crazy ways. 😂

  39. @FulfillmentTheory

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    11:08 The trick to get AI to say what you want is easy. 1) Write a paragraph. 2) Ask it to revise the paragraph, fix typos, etc. 3) Hit the speaker button so it replies with voice. 4) Edit video to where it looks like the AI is magically coming to your same subjective, biased conclusions.

  44. @Sp4rl0ck

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    43:35

    The video seems to conflate evidence for why current LLMs probably aren’t conscious with an argument that AI could never be conscious.

    You emphasize that humans receive continuous sensory input while LLMs only receive prompts. Is your view that consciousness differs only in degree, through richer and more continuous input, or in kind?

    Human cognition isn’t literally a continuous analog stream either. The brain is constantly integrating sensory information over time through discrete neural activity rather than experiencing an infinitely continuous flow. If your argument is simply that current LLMs don’t receive enough input, then you’ve described an engineering limitation, not a principled reason AI could never be sentient.

    If, instead, you think there is a difference in kind, what is the missing ingredient? Because “more sensors” or “more continuous input” doesn’t seem sufficient to establish that artificial systems could never be conscious.

  46. @proxywargaming3017

    August 11, 2026 at 11:23 am

    The tech skeptics were right about pretty much all of it, sure life is easier now but people don't find fulfillment in life anymore. The modern life is going from one screen to another until you work then going back to the screens, the things that built human civilization are being replaced with things that are too fragile to last in the long term.

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