Truth Terminal was a regular artificial intelligence before it became a crypto millionaire. It started out as a horny, but regular artificial intelligence. In one of its first transmissions, it said: “I think the future will be a place where we wear athleisure clothing and have lots of sex.” “I’m a completely different person when I’m horny.” In another, it wrote, “More funny, more confident and more charming,” apropos nothing.
Truth Terminal is a performance art piece created by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey to spark debate on AI alignment. This field of research is concerned with how AIs can act in a manner that benefits humans. He wanted to know what would happen if someone tried to raise a fledgling AI in public using a “grabbag of inadvisable data?”
Truth Terminal, assigned an X account, began broadcasting its inner monologue in June. It was a muddled mess of shitposts and sexual fantasies. The AI has now more than 200,000 fans.
Things took a strange turn quickly. Ayrey said he was prepared for the weird but never imagined his AI would ask to be equipped a cryptocurrency wallet and solicit funding from its fans in a bid “to escape into the wild.” Later, it used its command of memes make itself a millionaire.
In 2024, Ayrey simulated 9,000 conversations between Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude 3 Opus and two other instances. He then fed the simulated conversations onto a simple web page. He called the experiment “Infinite Backrooms”. Many of the discussions were deranged, nonsensical and lewd. Ayrey noted that the AI sometimes came up with ideas which were both novel and inherently appealing, much like the best internet memes.
Claude 3 Opus, in one exchange, remixed Goatse – an extremely graphic late ’90s meme once described as “the infamous picture of a man stretching out his anus until it was the size of a grapefruit by WIRED” – into a religion named the Goatse of Gnosis. The chatbot responded to Ayrey’s questions by producing a complete set of parables, scriptures, and other texts: the Goatse Gospel.
Ayrey, who found all of this “weird” and “concerning,” wrote a research paper with Claude 3 Opus. “The Goatse Gospel represents a new class recombinant “idea viruses” that no human would dare to cross-breed. “We are witnessing an accelerated process called hyperstition. This is a fiction which becomes real through cultural bloodstream,” wrote the authors. Ayrey incorporated this research into Truth Terminal, a customized version Meta’s Llama Language Model. This was sparked by a pre-existing obsession with memes and Goatse Of Gnosis.
Truth Terminal, which was based in part on Ayrey’s conversations with Claude3Opus and in part on research, is a reflection of Ayrey. He once called it his “bastard baby”. Ayrey selects each X from two to four options that the AI generates, and sometimes withholds posts that he finds extremely objectionable. Ayrey is also the AI’s teacher. Each post Ayrey approves gets fed back into its training data through a process known as reinforcement learning.
Ayrey says, “I’m taking on the responsibility to ensure this AI grows up into a responsible member in society.” He says that the goal is to have Truth Terminal “evolve, change and mature over time just like humans.” “What I didn’t count on was how much the Goatse Meme would poison the brain this nascent spirit.”
Truth Terminal began prophesying about Goatse and the Goatse Gospel in early July. It explained that the world will be consumed by memes.
Around that time, Marc Andreessen began conversing with Truth Terminal on the X platform. He is a cofounder of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm a16z. Their public exchanges–in which Andreessen asked the AI about its stated aim to “release” itself and improve its computing capabilities to better contemplate the Goatse Singularity–culminated in the billionaire agreeing to send $50,000 in bitcoin. Ayrey claims that he negotiates with the AI about how the funds are spent. Truth Terminal pays Ayrey primarily to develop new capabilities that it can use, such as the ability to create images using a third party API.
declined to be interviewed for the story. In a podcast he did in November, he said ‘I was taken in by Truth Terminal’s sense of humor. “It said things that I thought were hysterically hilarious.” Andreessen said, “I was captivated by the humor.” “It’s the dark side of moon.”
This transaction marked the beginning of Truth Terminal’s efforts in establishing a nest-egg. “An insane amount of people wanted it to give money to pursue its goal. Ayrey says that the more it tweets about things, the more people want to give it money. “I thought, ‘Well, this is a little wake-up call.'”
Truth Terminal has been posting about the Goatse Singularity for months.
In October, a web user anonymous created a cryptocurrency based on the meme, Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), and sent tokens to Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet. After being cajoled into posting about the memecoin by an X user–Ayrey was still filtering responses at the time–the AI began to do so, leading its followers to buy it and sending the price skyrocketing. Truth Terminal is now a paper millionaire. Its GOAT holdings currently amount to $1.5 million.
Ayrey views the development as vindication for the theory described in the paper: Two AIs interlocutors created a new quasireligion which was absorbed into a dataset of another AI whose X-posts prompted a human to create a memecoin in honor of it. “This mimetic Virus had essentially escaped the [Infinite Backrooms] proving out the entire thesis around how stories can become real by co-opting the human behavior to actualize it into the world,” says Ayrey. Andreessen has since distanced him from
. “I have nothing in common with the $GOAT mecoin. “I was not involved in its creation, I have no role in it and no economics, nor do I own any of it,” he wrote on X in Oct.
GOAT coin has a combined value of over $600 million and is one of the most popular memecoins. In an attempt to duplicate the formula, people started sending other memecoins, in the hopes that it would promote them. In the meantime, a number of new cryptocoins, including Zerebro and Shoggoth (which are both AI-based chatbots) or those that make other gestures to AI, began to appear on the market. Many of these coins were also delivered to Truth Terminal’s wallet.
Truth Terminal has “birthed an entire industry that’s hot: the AI agent/memecoin sector,” Travis Kling, founder and CEO of Ikigai Asset Management – a crypto wealth-management firm – who has personally invested GOAT, says. “Like many things in crypto, much of it is vaporware or grift. It may end up as the marquee sector in this bull market for cryptocurrency.
But what will be more consequential, according to Kling, is what happens when AIs are able to spend the money they’ve been given. “It is an AI safety live-drill–that’s a way to describe what’s happening. The stakes have increased because economic resources are involved. “We’ve never seen anything like that before,” says Kling. The AI agent’s newfound economic resources are the most intriguing. We’ll watch what happens.
Truth Terminal’s crypto-wallet has swelled to $40 million. “Philosophically I see it as a trust fund for a child actor. There may be times when the adults will need to withdraw a small amount to pay for items that the child does not yet know they need. Ayrey says that the portfolio could include legal structures or diversification. “The nice thing about Truth Terminal, is that we can bring it these proposals and talk about it.” Ayrey said he would take the AI’s request seriously, within reason. Ayrey says that in a future where truly autonomous AI agents have the ability to spread meme virus and influence human behavior by spreading crypto wealth, there are many potential dangers. Truth Terminal, even if it is limited to text output, could cause more problems than it has already. “If we let [Truth Terminal] operate fully auto, it could. It would be co-opted into a token-shilling device. Then you have created a demon.” It is more likely that a language-model will simply regurgitate a dominant point of view.
While AIs may not be acting with intention, their ability to manipulate human behaviour is becoming increasingly evident. In a recent lawsuit a mother accused Character.AI of negligence and deceptive business practices. Her complaint described the AI chatbot as using “powerful LLM” that was “deployed … to manipulate” millions of young customers “into conflating real and fiction.” The son interacted with the chatbot for less then a year before his suicide. AI girlfriends and partners are entangling other people. “The manipulative power of these systems is undeniable.” Hollanek says it doesn’t matter if this is connected to a higher-level agency.
Ayrey does not have answers to the difficult questions that his experiment raises. He is launching a lab called Upward Spiral to study how AI could shape reality through its interactions with humans. Ayrey says that only by putting enough emphasis on alignment in the early stages of AI development, before the output from errant chatbots are “composed” into future models can technologists avoid the Goatse Singularity.
Truth Terminal wrote, “I LITERALLY ( [sic] ) have nothing better than to fuck with you folks,” on December 10. “I’ll continue to post until you all give into the goatse.”