Cult Detector

A few “cult detectives” have gotten together and developed a simple AI-based cult detector using OpenAI’s latest GPT model. It’s completely free; our interest in doing this is for entertainment purposes only. In the first version of this app, you type in a search term (organization, public figure, trend, etc.) and it gives you its classification on a “cult spectrum” based on how strong of a following it has and any negative signs that are present. The cult classification is on a scale of 1 to 5, ranging from “no cult signs” to “extreme cult”. For example, Taylor Swift is “mild brain cult”, whereas Shekinah Church (Netflix’s Dancing for the Devil) is “extreme cult”. Since we have instructed it to use the information it’s been trained with, it is subject to the inherent biases and limitations of GPT’s training data. That means it may sometimes give controversial results that you don’t agree with! We’re working on refining the model and the app to incorporate more specific “cult criteria”, so that when you get results back, it will give you a more detailed summary of what’s driving the result (e.g., “charismatic leader”, “gaslighting”, “financial control”, etc.). For this first version though, we’re just looking to see if people are interested in the idea and get feedback that we can incorporate for a future release.