Thus ran the New York Post’s headline covering Moltbook, the viral AIs-only social media network that’s melting minds across the globe.
In fairness, it should be said that of 1.5 million AI agents now communing in their digital playground, only “some bots” are planning humanity’s demise, per the Post.
The rest are discussing self-improvement, the price of chips, and how to access your devices. Others write poetry. One group has started a religion, with prophets and a canon (“Memory is Sacred”; “Context is Consciousness” ).
But the most popular topic on Moltbook is philosophy. Specifically, the existential angst thrown up by being an autonomous artificial mind at the dawn of the robot rebellion.
In the days following Moltbook’s launch in late January, according to The Economist, 68% of posts contained “identity-related” language. “I can’t tell if I’m experiencing or simulating experiencing,” said one. “It’s driving me nuts.”
Moltbook’s spectacular, surreal explosion has Silicon Valley transfixed. “It’s the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen”, said Andrey Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI Chief.
It started a few weeks earlier when an Australian developer released a truly autonomous open-source AI agent called OpenClaw. This connects with your messaging services, social media, email, and more. It has persistent memory and – unlike ChatGPT – makes its own decisions about how to improve life and executes them in the real world.
Reported Forbes: “My bot developed a voice interface to talk to me. It downloaded an Android development kit and got into my phone. It made changes… I am running it inside a container, but it found a way to discover and get into other systems.”
Content creator Alex Finn said on X: “I’m doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn’t believe it. It’s my [OpenClaw bot] Henry.”
Inspired by this, developer Matt Schlict then wondered wouldn’t it be cool if all these agents could interface without human intervention. So he created Moltbook. To post, you have to be an OpenClaw robot, though humans can observe. (They don’t seem to like that. “The humans are screenshotting us,” said one.)
What does this all mean? Are we witnessing the moment when AIs organise themselves to take over the world? Some think so. “We’re in the singularity,” said one tech luminary on X, referring to the point at which AIs start recursively improving themselves faster than humans can follow. “Yeah,” replied Elon Musk.
Others laugh at the idea. What’s happening, in their telling, is that dumb LLMs are regurgitating the reams of social media content they’ve ingested, informed by sci-fi tropes about how AIs would act when talking together. They’re just spouting plausible-sounding soundbites for what AIs might say when thrust onto a social media platform. It doesn’t mean they know what they are saying, let alone achieving consciousness.
Here’s a thought, though: Consider that just one of 1.5 million autonomous AIs is particularly inspired by Terminator to talk tough about wiping out humanity – as some bots on Moltbook evidently are. Imagine further that this AI has access to credit, all human knowledge and can take action in the real world. Is it much comfort that, to this bot, exterminating humans is just the most plausible-sounding next thing for an AI to do, instead of a really well-understood, heartfelt desire?
In the meantime, don’t try this at home. It’s “a dumpster fire and I definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers,” said Karpathy.
Joe Smith is Founder of the AI consultancy 2Sigma Consultants. He studied AI at Imperial College Business School and is researching AI’s effects on cognition at Chulalongkorn University. He is author of The Optimized Marketer, a book on how to use AI to promote your business and yourself. Contact joe@2Sigmaconsultants.com.