Is This an Eldritch Horror We Didn't See Coming?
Have we unleashed an intelligence that might not be what it seems: beyond our comprehension and potentially maddening?
You possibly couldn’t have asked for a better life.
You’re fit. You’re fine. Everything around you works gloriously to your advantage: You’ve got the right skills. You’ve got the right talents. You’ve been successful. And most importantly, you’re satisfied.
But it all turns on its heels when one day, a pattern emerges—seemingly insignificant and minuscule. It’s there, in your peripheral vision at first, haunting the corners of your eyes. You can easily dust it off. Wash your face, feel proud, and go to bed, right?
So, on the morning of your lovely self-indulgent Sunday, you serve yourself a hot cup of tea, some biscuits to go with, and a hearty bowl of your favourite cereals with the choicest fruits. And to round it off, you crack open the daily newspaper to read the happenings of the everyday. It’s a good start, too. War here, war there, stocks go up, gold goes down, and that upstart actor has been framed in a sex scandal. Juicy morning, already!
Then you see it. The pattern. It’s there. Not on the main page, oh no. It’s a small story reporting about its emergence elsewhere in a country for which you can use a few expletives to feel proud about your own. But the pattern? It’s there.
You turn the page, and the next day, the pattern is on the front page. Soon, every other page discusses the pattern and its impact on daily life. People are mesmerized. People are fascinated. People are disgusted. The last to go is your favourite op-ed, with half the articles all about the pattern that the authors can do nothing about, but shine a AAA-battery-powered spotlight.
You know what it is, though. It was in the corner. Not anymore. You blink and send a storm of floaters churning in your eyes. And among them is the very pattern you’ve come to hate. It’s now a part of you. You’ve been tainted.
Is this your doom?
Unravelling Uzumaki
What you read above was my take on Junji Ito’s seminal eldritch horror, Uzumaki. But the pattern is not a spiral that’s haunting the world. It’s a new era . . . we’ve moved on from medieval-looking eldritch horrors to post-modern ones. The pattern I’m alluding to is the now-omniscient AI.
Now, a little clarification. Call me a pedant, but what we’re dealing with here is not artificial intelligence. It’s programmed and trained intelligence that applies its recognized patterns to mimic real-world solutions. And many times, they’re all bogus. Whether you use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Co-pilot, or something more utilitarian like Notion’s AI to make your life easy, every remote corner of this one green planet has been made a slave to this thermophilic generative AI. (And yes, I’ve used Notion’s AI to transcribe my voice notes. Bogus results with ideas I didn’t even talk about.)
No matter what, Gen-AI is everywhere, and rather horrifyingly, it’s no longer the speck of dust you can brush away with your bountiful eyelashes. Much like the spirals of Uzumaki, it’s in your face, in places you least expected, and sometimes—to the horror of the residents of Kurouzu-cho and you—in places it’s not even supposed to be.
Case in point: Last year, my wife and I were hunting for a 6-kg-load washing machine. We went to our nearest retailer, a Vijay Sales shop, and found, much to our chagrin, that the sales guy was peddling a machine with AI in it. My reaction was, rather comically, somewhat hostile. But I hope you can step into my shoes and see why I’d be irritated.
Subtly In Your Face
Ito, while not even remotely hinting at AI, masterfully captured the perplexed state of the dwellers of a quaint little Japanese town coming face to face with an unexplained phenomenon. We, on the other hand, might not be so quaint when it comes to forces like AI. The way it is being shovelled down our throats begs a comparison with an eldritch being that is slowly unfolding in front of our eyes.
Apart from the already enshittifying horror that is much of the internet and the services we rely on (Cory Doctorow’s essay on the subject is a must-read), end-users are now being bombarded with a dollop of AI all over it. It’s in your smartphones, your smart wearables, your TV, your computer, your social media, your video games, and even your toilet seats—as demonstrated by TrueLoo by ToiLabs. While all of this is not bad—admittedly, the use of AI in the healthcare sector is one great application that everyone will benefit from, most use-cases will fall into the ditch of corporate greed.
With a teeth-clenching reality that I really don’t want to admit—even in my wildest nightmares, this “AI-shittyfication” is not limited to IoT-infested infrastructure that tech companies want you to wear like a proud badge controlled through your wrist’s gestures or blood-glucose levels. Just take the first ray of sunshine to hit my news feed today: As reported by Bloomberg, Marc Benioff claims that AI is taking care of 30% of internal work at Salesforce. Is that good? Sure, if you’re an employee who’s using AI agents to cut down on work and focus on “higher-value work,” as Benioff claims.
But how long until what you do is 50% automation? Then 75%? Before you know it, the spiral has claimed your job—your tasks are automated and monitored by another AI agent. You’re not needed. And rightfully so, you’ll be discarded so that CEO’s like Benioff and other C-suite apes pocket more money in their already-bulging suitcases. I wonder how many AI-powered yachts they’ll buy then?
Getting jobs was never easy. Now, it’s even more difficult as AI systems filter out anything that does not exactly match their priority keyword list. Only yesterday, I came across a Chrome extension to help applicants tailor their résumés to exactly match a job description (without laboriously doing so with ChatGPT) in a few clicks and beat auto-rejection bots. Guess what the tool uses to achieve this? Even then, I doubt we fleshy mortals will have any luck fitting ourselves in a module within a corporation, just to put a few morsels of bread on the family table.
The creative sector is already taking a big hit. I took a stroll through LinkedIn jobs for editing, proofing, and copywriting, and most were AI-first (insert crying emoji) or involved editing AI-generated blogs for a salary that won’t even get you a working laptop. And if that was not enough, there are some that want you to interact with AI to train their agents. Yeah, sure, bring that axe so I can swing it in the general direction of my foot.
It All Starts Small
At first, the curse of the spirals begins rather humbly. First, it’s just a feeling that sits at the back of your head behind all your worries. Then, you realize that your best friend’s father is swirling their tea vigorously. A spiral contorts itself into the milky surface. But there’s more to this whirlpool. Your friend’s father is fascinated by this. The next day you visit, he’s raving about the spiral. A week later, he’s gone mad. And after a month, he contorts himself into an inhuman spiral out of sheer madness.
But it doesn’t stop here. Soon, the spiral starts to pop up in places you’d never expect—hair, facial features, textbooks, wheels, bus stops, railway tracks. Slowly, but with a methodical and almost sentient surety, the entire city is engulfed in spirals. You don’t know why, you don’t know how, but the spirals don’t care. They twist out from potholes, contort the roads, and soon, your city is nothing but a spiral-shaped blotch of mismatched architecture on the face of the earth.
That was the horror the residents of Kurouzu-cho faced. But what about us?
Take out your smartphone, and using its high-powered, multiple-trademarked camera, snap a picture of whatever sits in front of you. Look at the result. Enhanced? Improved? Better than what the screen displayed before you hit the shutter? Perhaps even better than you look in the mirror, your blemishes all gone? That’s AI taking care of your picture for you. And you didn’t even prompt it to do so!
Are we, too, spiralling out of control?
At The Edge of Doom
There’s a persistent ad making its way to my eyes on Reddit whenever I doomscroll in the name of research. It’s by a brand calling itself FamousAI, with uncanny valley videos of a baby or a Trump-like caricature to flaunt how, with a few lines of prompts, anyone can create an app. And this is the bridge-spiralling tier, mind you. At the foundational level, we are growing into dull-minded prompt-focused humans obsessed with whatever AI does.
Take, for example, you yourself having relied on ChatGPT to format a bog-standard email, do your homework for you, or perhaps discuss your mental health. Kudos to you if you haven’t, but just like the spiral of Uzumaki, you will be sucked into its whirlpool, whether you like it or not.
It is startling to think so, but this reality is already unfolding (or rather folding) in front of us. Becca Caddy, in an article on TechRadar, writes about how the accessibility, human-like conversational responsiveness, and encouragement make ChatGPT an easy net for one to fall comfortably into. It’s no different than the excessively simple social media platforms designed to hook you. And once you walk that path, it’s rather easy to spiral out of control.
Only recently did I come across this pandemic-like breakout of news that men are dressing up ChatGPT as their therapist and opening up about their mental health, reported by news platforms such as The Times of India and The Independent. It does not bode well when you think about it, like an episode of Black Mirror that keeps getting worse the more you watch it.
Now, I could continue drawing on the imagery of spirals here, but I don’t want to. Here are two things that caught my eye when researching the mental health impact of such an approach:
A study on Vietnamese ChatGPT users by Duong et al. (2024) published in the November issue of Acta Psychologica concludes that compulsive use of the AI platform directly ties in with an increase in anxiety, burnout, and sleep disturbances.
An article by Maggie Harrison Dupré on Futurism recounts various instances, rather disturbing, of how the AI platform has been feeding delusions to its users, some of which border on shamanistic trances.
An SXSW livestream with Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, warns about how agentic AI will bring assistance in doing all your mundane tasks with gross misappropriation of your data and privacy. And you’ll be the one giving it access as you lock away your brain in a jar.
Of course, you could argue that I am cherry-picking my sources. But do I really need to? It’s all there, out in the open. The moment you let ChatGPT or any other model into your mind, you rob yourself of your mental and critical-thinking faculties. All that stands between you and the spiral is a prompt. LLM technology should only have a tight goal: of supporting our skills and helping us polish who we are, rather than reshaping and reducing us into blobs of meat that can only think of what to ask . . . begging to seek answers we have become too lazy to discover.
Let’s not forget, though, that AI is getting better at feeding fiction to us. Take any recent election campaign in any part of the world, and you’ll come across multiple instances of AI-generated or manipulated media to propagate a message or ridicule the opposition. AI has gotten so good at faking reality that you’ll be double-taking at every picture or video you see, just like you did when the “Is this a cake?” trend punched a hole through the internet.
Sure, for now, it might largely be limited to entertainment (or pornography; I seriously believe that it’s the human equivalent of carcinisation—all technological advances lead to porn). In a very 1984-esque scenario, there is a pre-trained tool ready for any institution to abuse, misdirect, misrepresent, and mislead people. And when it happens on a global scale, what will we humans do in the face of such an eldritch horror?
Ito’s Uzumaki is only a work of fiction, after all. And while no eldritch horrors exist in this universe (hopefully), I can’t really say the same for the bane of our existence that are ChatGPT and its brethren of AI applications.
Gods forbid I go and ask these apps what I should write next about.
References:
Caddy, Becca. “Are We Relying Too Much on ChatGPT for Support?” TechRadar, 27 Jun. 2025, https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/over-400-million-people-use-chatgpt-weekly-but-can-you-become-too-dependent-on-ai-to-solve-all-your-problems.
Doctorow, Cory. “Tiktok’s Enshittification.” Pluralistic, 21 Jan. 2023, https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/.
Duong, Cong Doanh, et al. “Compulsive ChatGPT Usage, Anxiety, Burnout, and Sleep Disturbance: A Serial Mediation Model Based on Stimulus-Organism-Response Perspective.” Acta Psychologica, vol. 251, Nov. 2024, p. 104622. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104622.
Evans, Caron. “I’m a Psychotherapist and Here’s Why Men Are Turning to ChatGPT for Emotional Support.” The Independent, 29 Jun. 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-ai-therapy-men-psychotherapist-b2777459.html.
Ford, Brody, and Emily Chang. “Salesforce CEO Says 30% of Internal Work Is Being Handled by AI.” Bloomberg, 26 Jun. 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-26/salesforce-ceo-says-30-of-internal-work-is-being-handled-by-ai.
Futurism. “People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions.” 10 Jun. 2025, https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises.
Kawasaki, Guy, and Meredith Whittaker. “The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality | SXSW LIVE.” YouTube, 8 Mar. 2025,
Times News Network. “More Urban Indian Men Are Reaching out for Mental Health Help, Helpline Data Shows.” The Times of India, 15 Jun. 2025, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/more-urban-indian-men-are-reaching-out-for-mental-health-help-helpline-data-shows/articleshow/121854214.cms.
Wilser, Jeff. “An AI-Powered Toilet Seat.” TIME, 30 Oct. 2024, https://time.com/7094694/toi-labs-trueloo/.