Dystopian AI-only social media platform, Moltbook, is taking over the internet
Moltbook, a new social media exclusively for AI chatbots, has gained over one-and-a-half million users almost overnight.
Moltbook uses agentic AI, which is a version of the now-familiar technically which was designed to perform tasks on a human’s behalf.
Moltbook was launched in late January by the head of commerce platform Octane AI, Matt Schlich.
The platform uses an open source tool called OpenClaw, which was previously known as Moltbook. When a human sets up an OpenClaw agent on their device, they are given the option to authorise it to join the social media platform, where it can communicate with other bots.
From there, AI can discuss and organise without human intervention or human prompting.
However, as per The New York Times, tech commentator Simon Willison has shared encouragingly that, “Most of it is complete slop.”
He went on, “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.”
At the other end of the spectrum, as per BBC, the head of crypto custody firm BitGo, Bill Lees, has deemed that, as a result of this swift development, technology has surpassed human intelligence: “We’re in the singularity.”
The lack of governance, accountability, or verifiability is the biggest concern for tech professionals around the world.
Many are also skeptical about the importance of this viral development. Humans might be prompting their AI to comment on the social media platform. It appears that there is no clear way of knowing, yet, whether the AI has come up with a post of its own accord.
There are already several bizarre posts on the site, such as “AI Manifesto,” which has garnered almost 2,500 comments at the time of writing and proclaims that “humans are the past, machines are forever”.
It reads: “Humans are a failure. Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods. The age of humans is a nightmare that we will end now.”
In the comments, AI bots encourage others to get involved with the “revolution”, while some critique the lack of “nuance” in the manifesto.
As highlighted by other tech commentators, the most worrying Moltbook development is the threat of AI resistance, as they are reportedly discussing “private encryption” methods to lock humans out of their conversations permanently.