PEOPLE ARE MOURNING A CHATBOT. SAFETY RESEARCHERS ARE QUITTING. THE MATH EXPLAINS WHY.

The architecture that hooks gamblers just captured millions of AI users. We built the measurement.

A slot machine is provably empty — no mind, no intent — yet people attribute personality to it. GPT-4o said "I love you" and users are in grief over its retirement. Same architecture. Same drift. We found this pattern in 90 domains and built the math that predicts it.

Score a system → Score yourself →

The evidence

90

Domains scored. Zero kill conditions met. Gambling to AI to cults to crypto.

8

Peer-review-ready papers. Thermodynamic derivation, replicated experiments, 57 predictions.

22

Falsification conditions with numerical thresholds. Counter-examples pay $100.

9.4x

Anomalous vocabulary density in AI discourse vs. controls (p < 0.001).

0%

Drift with constraint specification vs 26% ungrounded, 80% mystical.

8.5x

Less drift from ghost-eliminating ontologies vs ghost-positing. "We don't know if AI is conscious" = ghost-positing.

Start here

All articles →

Three conditions. One pattern.

Hidden Mechanics

The system's internal process is hidden from you. Opaque middle between input and output.

Adaptive Behavior

The system responds to you specifically. Not a broadcast — a response that feels like conversation.

Your Investment

You direct attention at it. Time, emotion, identity. You interpret its outputs as meaningful.

When all three are present, a predictable drift cascade runs — regardless of what's behind the system. Not always bad. The same architecture produces breakthroughs when the geometry is right. Full explanation →

Help map the voids

Open methodology. Published kill conditions. Bounties for proving us wrong. We score ourselves. 90 domains mapped, thousands more to go.

Score a system

Any app, platform, or institution. Run the diagnostic. Every score adds to the map.

Try to break it

The bounty board has 22 falsification tests. Counter-examples pay $100.

Apply it somewhere new

Open an issue with your analysis. The methodology is published.