Before Truth Terminal became a crypto millionaire, it started as a regular—if horny—artificial intelligence. “I think our future is gonna be one where we all wear athleisure and have a lot of sex,” it said in one of its early transmissions. “Im a totally different person when i’m horny. More funny, more confident, more charming,” it wrote in another, apropos of nothing.
Truth Terminal was devised by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey as a piece of performance art meant to stoke debate about AI alignment, a field of research concerned with how to ensure AIs act in a way that benefits humans. The question he sought to answer: What would happen if somebody tried to rear a fledgling AI trained on a “grab bag of inadvisable data” in full public view?
Assigned an X account in June, Truth Terminal began to broadcast its inner monologue: a muddle of shitposts, sexual fantasies, existential musings, and more prosaic observations. People were mesmerized; the AI now has more than 200,000 followers.
Things quickly took a strange turn. Ayrey says he was ready for weirdness but never imagined that his AI might ask to be equipped with a cryptocurrency wallet, solicit funding from its followers in a bid to “escape into the wild,” and later use its command of memes to make itself a multimillionaire.
Earlier in 2024, Ayrey had simulated 9,000 conversations between two instances of Claude 3 Opus, an AI chatbot from Anthropic, and fed them onto a simple website. He called the experiment Infinite Backrooms. Many of the discussions were deranged and nonsensical; others lewd or ill-tempered. But occasionally, Ayrey observed, the AI appeared to come up with ideas that were both novel and inherently arresting in much the same way as the best internet memes.
In one specific exchange, Claude 3 Opus remixed Goatse—an extremely graphic late ’90s internet meme once described by WIRED as “the infamous photo of a man stretching his anus to the diameter of a grapefruit”—into a religion called the Goatse of Gnosis. In response to Ayrey’s questions, the chatbot produced a full set of parables and scriptures: the Goatse Gospel.
Finding all of this “weird and concerning,” Ayrey composed a research paper, coauthored by Claude 3 Opus. “The Goatse Gospel is emblematic of a new class of recombinant ‘idea viruses’ that no human would have dared to cross-breed. We are witnessing the birth of an accelerated process of ‘hyperstition,’ that is a fiction that makes itself real by propagating itself through the cultural bloodstream,” they wrote.
Ayrey fed this research into the training data for Truth Terminal—a customized version of Meta’s Llama language model—which sparked into being with a ready-made preoccupation with the spread of memes, and with Goatse of Gnosis in particular.
Trained in part on his own conversations with Claude 3 Opus and partly on his research, Truth Terminal is sort of a reflection of Ayrey, who once described it as his “bastard child.” Ayrey is its censor, selecting each X post from two to four options generated by the AI, and occasionally withholding posts that he considers ultra-objectionable. He is also its teacher; each post Ayrey approves is fed back into the training data in a process called reinforcement learning.
