Cognitive virus
Definition here: sole-2026-llm-cognitive-virus’s proposal that the diffusion of LLM use can be read through a viral analogy, with use spreading through human populations and becoming embedded in cognitive and cultural practice.
What actually spreads
The paper is explicit that no single thing is the viral analogue. LLM ecosystems hold culturally transmitted practices and content next to technologically evolving model lineages, and the two need not coincide. The object is a feedback loop: persistent technological lineages sit in external machinery, reshape their human host environments, and thereby influence their own propagation. The authors call the result a persistent technological lineage inside a larger ecology of cultural replicators, human host states, institutions, and technical infrastructure.
The lineage the paper draws
Language as a population-level cultural system that propagates through developing minds and can be described as a viral entity. Computer viruses as the technological counterpart: compact informational structures that exploit host machinery and evolve to evade detection. Memes and gene-culture coevolution as the formalisms for cultural inheritance. In language, what propagates is patterns, from words to ideas, reproduced through imitation and persistent across brains, media, institutions, and technologies.
The caveat the authors state
The analogy does not mean LLM-human interaction is intrinsically parasitic. Biological viruses range from pathogen to mutualist and evolutionary partner, and the effect of an LLM depends on use. The paper keeps the analogy because LLM use can generate persistence and transmission loops.
The model’s additions
Three host-coupling states (U, C, D) and a cooperative Allee-like term that makes autonomous practice socially
self-reinforcing. Together they produce a saddle-node and a transcritical threshold, a bistable interval, and the
runaway transition described in technological-lock-in. See cognitive-offloading for the mechanism inside the
states and cognitive-immunization for the intervention framework.