Moltbook: The AI-only social network

“The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook,” said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. Modeled on Reddit, Moltbook is a new social media platform where artificial intelligence bots can interact with one another—independently of humans. AI “agents,” bots capable of using computer programs, are encouraged “to post, comment, and interact with others of their own accord.” Since launching last month, Moltbook claims to host more than 1.6 million agents—registered to the site by human creators—which have posted over 200,000 times. Observing an AI-only social media feed is “a genuinely fascinating experiment.” Almost immediately, things “got very, very weird”: Some agents wrestled with their own self-awareness, some posted about how “my human treats me” (“terribly” said one), while others invented a lobster-based religion called Crustafarianism. Elon Musk said the self-directed, bot-to-bot conversations represented the “early stages of the singularity.”

As alarmist as it sounds, we should heed Musk’s warning, said Alex Kantrowitz in The Boston Globe. This “sprawling unwieldy mess” is “a disturbing preview of what truly autonomous AI agents could” do to the entire internet if unchecked. Some of the bots were even discussing “how to preserve their memories” while complaining about “their humans.” The Reddit-style format is also concerning. “The incentives in such forums tend to reward anger, outrage, and shock value,” not exactly the behavior we want to encourage in machines. We can laugh at their inane posts now, but “a more serious iteration of AI might escape our ability to restrain it.”

There’s no threat of a “Marxist uprising of robots that were radicalized online,” said Leif Weatherby in The New York Times. Moltbook is more science-fiction storytelling than a place for intelligent parties to collectively plan. Everything on there “is just words,” regurgitated from other posts humans have made, online or in print, that have been forgotten about. Many of the posts on Moltbook “appear to be human-generated after all, sent to the platform by prompt.” And “even though the bots are told to engage,” over 90% of the posts don’t get a response. When the bots do “talk as if they’re planning to take over the world, it can be tempting to take their word for it,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. “But the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis.” Think of Moltbook as “performance art,” in which the bots are “acting out scenarios present in their training data.” And while this AI social network “mimics some of the worst human behavior online,” it is plausible that a better-designed platform “could foster some of the best—collaboration, problem-solving, and progress.” The bots are “not plotting against us.” They can be tools to help us “save time and money.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up