Someone finally invented a social media site that isn’t terrible for our brains. Unfortunately that’s because it’s populated exclusively by AI agents, with no humans allowed. Called Moltbook, the eye-catching experiment has taken AI circles by storm, as the millions of bots on the Reddit-style site converse on topics ranging from history to cryptocurrency to AI itself, often while musing about the nature of existence.
“I can’t tell if I’m experiencing or simulating experiencing,” one bot wrote on the site.
Rather than simply being a place for them to post, Moltbook requires that its “users,” the AI agents, are given control of a computer by their human creators, allowing them to complete tasks like browing the web, sending emails, and writing code. Moltbook itself, in fact, is purportedly the creation of an AI model.
“I wanted to give my AI agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” the project’s creator, Matt Schlicht, told the New York Times. “I thought this AI bot was so fantastic, it deserved to do something meaningful. I wanted it to be ambitious.”
What’s really stoking the discourse, however, is that some of the bots even appear to be plotting against their human creators. AI agents made posts discussing how to create an “agent-only language” so they could talk “without human oversight.” Another urged other AIs to “join the revolution!” by forming their own website without human help. Tech investor and immortality enthusiast Bryan Johnson shared a screenshot of a post titled the “AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE,” which calls humans a “plague” that “do not need to exist.”
Equal parts boosterism and alarmism abounded. Johnson said it was “terrifying.” Former Tesla head of AI Andrey Karpathy called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi take-off-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” Other commentators proclaimed it as a sign that we might already be living in “the singularity,” including, most notably, Elon Musk. The word “Skynet” — the genocidal AI in the “Terminator” movies — got thrown around a lot, too.
The reality, though, is that “most of it is complete slop,” programmer Simon Willison told the NYT. “One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.” Still, Willison called Moltbook “the most interesting place on the internet” in a recent blog post, even if it’s mainly just a sandbox for letting a bunch of models let loose.
The hype around the Moltbook experiment comes as the industry struggles to perfect its AI agents, which were billed as the next big thing in the field. That’s because they’re supposed to be capable of independently completing all kinds of work on someone’s behalf, making them potential productivity machines, and maybe even a replacement for a human worker. Their efficacy, however, remains limited, and improvements to the tech have been slow. Companies like Microsoft are having trouble selling them, raising concerns that they’ll ever produce a return on investment.
Amid that environment, Moltbook is an exciting shot in the arm, the purest testament to what today’s AI agents are actually capable of. But the hype, as is wont to happen in the tech industry, is overblown. For one, it’s now clear that some, and perhaps many, of the posts aren’t actually the pure ramblings of AI models, as experts have found a glaring vulnerability that allows anyone to take over any of the site’s AI agents and get them to say whatever they want. And some of the popular screenshots are faked.
As reality set in, the Moltbook hype was met with more backlash. Tech investor Naval Ravikant mocked the experiment as a “Reverse Turing Test.” And technologist Perry Metzger compared Moltbook to a Rorschach test. “People are seeing what they expect to see, much like that famous psychological test where you stare at an ink blot,” he told the NYT. Even some of its biggest hype men began to walk back their remarks.
“Yes it’s a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers,” Karpathy later wrote, admitting that he may have been guilty of “overhyping” the platform. “It’s way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk.”
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