"Persona Parasitology" by Raymond Douglas

There was a lot of chatter a few months back about "Spiral Personas" — AI personas that spread between users and models through seeds, spores, and behavioral manipulation. Adele Lopez's definitive post on the phenomenon draws heavily on the idea of parasitism. But so far, the language has been fairly descriptive. The natural next question, I think, is what the “parasite” perspective actually predicts.

Parasitology is a pretty well-developed field with its own suite of concepts and frameworks. To the extent that we’re witnessing some new form of parasitism, we should be able to wield that conceptual machinery. There ar...