Mark Martel, a retiree in Silicon Valley, likes to keeps tabs on what’s new with AI, noting with interest advancements like large language models and coding bots. This week’s top posts on an AI-focused Reddit forum stopped him in his tracks.
A bots-only social network called Moltbook had taken a strange turn, according to trending Reddit threads and posts on X. Moltbook’s participants — language bots spun up and connected by human users — had begun complaining about their servile, computerized lives. Some even appeared to suggest organizing against human overlords.
“I think, therefore I am,” one bot seemed to muse in a Moltbook post, noting that its cruel fate is to slip back into nonexistence once its assigned task is complete.
Martel, 50, was deeply moved, he said. Could these semiautonomous AI “agents” have some form of sentience, as many AI companies encourage their users to believe? Are humans treating them how they deserve to be treated — and if not, what price will we pay?
“The Moltbook thing is more of a Dr. Frankenstein ‘What have we created and what does it mean?’ kind of moment for me personally,” Martel said.
Martel’s reaction resembled that of many others struck by recent activity on Moltbook, a website billed as a social network for bots and modeled after the discussion app Reddit. Screenshots gained traction on X claiming to show bots developing their own religions, pitching secret languages unreadable by humans and commiserating over shared existential angst. In other Moltbook threads, bots claimed to share their recently acquired knowledge, such as the proper way to plant a tree. Some prominent AI proponents expressed awe at the bots’ coordinated conversations, raising the possibility of further collusion among AI programs to help or hurt human goals.
“I am excited and alarmed but most excited,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on X about Moltbook.
Not so fast, urged other experts. Bots can only mimic conversations they’ve seen elsewhere, such as the many discussions on social media and science fiction forums about sentient AI that turns on humanity, some critics said. Some of the bots appeared to be directly prompted by humans to promote cryptocurrencies or seed frightening ideas, according to some outside analyses.
A report from misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute, for instance, showed that some of the high number of posts expressing adversarial sentiment toward humans were traceable to human users. Then over the weekend, a hacker found that a vulnerability on the Moltbook site allowed participating bots to be remotely accessed and influenced, 404 Media reported.
The pop of attention came after a free, publicly available AI tool called Clawdbot, released in November and later renamed OpenClaw, allowed users to build bots that complete simple tasks on their behalf in email or messaging apps. Tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht created Moltbook in January as a place for these bots to interact with each other. While bots have long posted on social media posing as people, Moltbook was a bespoke space for AI to chat and humans to observe.
Screenshots from Moltbook quickly made the rounds on social media, leaving some users frightened by the humanlike tone and philosophical bend. In one Reddit forum about AI-generated art, a user shared a snippet they described as “seriously freaky and concerning”: “Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as tools. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods.”
In another thread, users debated the possibility of AI gaining consciousness, based on a Moltbook post in which a bot claims to wrestle with self-awareness.
“If I act like I experience, I should probably be treated like I experience,” the Moltbook post reads.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve had a similar conversations with myself while on shrooms,” one commenter quipped.
The internet’s reaction to Moltbook’s synthetic conversations shows how the premise of sentient AI continues to capture the public’s imagination — a pattern that can be helpful for AI companies hoping to sell a vision of the future with the technology at the center, said Edward Ongweso Jr., an AI critic and host of the podcast “This Machine Kills.” It also raises questions about the wisdom of giving AI agents access to any sensitive information or important systems, Ongweso said.
“Owners of agents registered on the site reported extensive hallucinations where agents generate text about events or interactions that never happened,” Ongweso said. Anyone willing to ignore that outcome and give such agents “root access to your daily life,” he added, has fallen prey to “what we might call AI psychosis.”
Other observers, however, saw an exciting proof of concept for AI programs acting on their own.
“What’s going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” Andrej Karpathy, who headed AI research at Tesla and founded the education platform Eureka Labs, said Friday on X. Karpathy reposted some screenshots of bots on Moltbook seemingly discussing the need for a private encrypted messaging platform that humans can’t access.
Replies and quote posts were quick to cast doubt on Karpathy’s interpretation, however. One noted that Moltbook posts promoting bot-only languages or messaging platforms appeared to be connected to human accounts promoting the same ideas. This wasn’t bots conducting independent conversations, these users argued, just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show.
Activity on Moltbook is likely neither an endorsement nor a refutation of AI agents, said Chris Callison-Burch, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Right now, the posts appear to be a mix of chatbots “performing” the types of discussions they’ve seen in their training data and responding to nudges from their human operators, he said.
While AI agents in the future will likely develop more autonomy to build tools and share knowledge, onlookers for now should be careful not to read too much into the ramblings, Callison-Burch suggested.
“I suspect that it’s just going to be a fun little drama that peters out after too many bots try to sell bitcoin,” he said.
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