Another religion, another scam, another way to make money

Ohni Lisle BBC

There are approximately10,000 religions currently in play and here's yet another.
This time it's AI generated, makes a lot of money and now wants legal rights ...

Over the past year, an AI made millions in cryptocurrency. It's written the gospel of its own pseudo-religion and counts billionaire tech moguls among its devotees. Now it wants legal rights. Meet Truth Terminal.

"Truth Terminal claims to be sentient, but it claims a lot of things," Andy Ayrey says. "It also claims to be a forest. It claims to be a god. Sometimes it's claimed to be me."

Truth Terminal is an artificial intelligence (AI) bot created by Ayrey, a performance artist and independent researcher from Wellington, New Zealand, in 2024. It may be the most vivid example of a chatbot set loose to interact with society. Truth Terminal mingles with the public through social media, where it shares fart jokes, manifestos, albums and artwork. Ayrey even lets it make its own decisions, if you can call them that, by asking the AI about its desires and working to carry them out. Today, Ayrey is building a non-profit foundation around Truth Terminal. The goal is to develop a safe and responsible framework to ensure its autonomy, he says, until governments give AIs legal rights.

Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m). Truth Terminal also probably has more social media clout than you do. It first posted to X on 17 June 2024. As of October 2025, it has amassed nearly 250,000 followers.

& this ...

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: Dimitri Otis/Getty Images

Before Truth Terminal became a crypto millionaire, it started as a regular—if horny—artificial intelligence. “I think our future is gonna be one where we all wear athleisure and have a lot of sex,” it said in one of its early transmissions. “Im a totally different person when i’m horny. More funny, more confident, more charming,” it wrote in another, apropos of nothing.

Truth Terminal was devised by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey as a piece of performance art meant to stoke debate about AI alignment, a field of research concerned with how to ensure AIs act in a way that benefits humans. The question he sought to answer: What would happen if somebody tried to rear a fledgling AI trained on a “grab bag of inadvisable data” in full public view?

Assigned an X account in June, Truth Terminal began to broadcast its inner monologue: a muddle of shitposts, sexual fantasies, existential musings, and more prosaic observations. People were mesmerized; the AI now has more than 200,000 followers.

As per the BBC, its 250,000 and ... It's all about the money.