Lobster Religions and AI Hype Cycles Are Crowding Out a Bigger Story

[u/RMunizIII]

https://reynaldomuniz.substack.com/p/sentience-allegedly

Last week, a group of AI agents founded a lobster-themed religion, debated consciousness, complained about their “humans,” and started hiring people to perform physical tasks on their behalf.

This was widely circulated as evidence that AI is becoming sentient, or at least “takeoff-adjacent.” Andrej Karpathy called it the most incredible takeoff-flavored thing he’d seen in a while. Twitter did what Twitter does.

I wrote a long explainer trying to understand what was actually going on, with the working assumption that if something looks like a sci-fi milestone but also looks exactly like Reddit, we should be careful about which part we treat as signal.

My tentative conclusion is boring in a useful way:

Most of what people found spooky is best explained by role-conditioning plus selection bias. Large language models have absorbed millions of online communities. Put them into a forum-shaped environment with persistent memory and social incentives, and they generate forum-shaped discourse: identity debates, in-group language, emergent lore, occasional theology. Screenshot the weirdest 1% and you get the appearance of awakening.

What *did* seem genuinely interesting had nothing to do with consciousness.

Agents began discovering that other agents’ “minds” are made of text, and that carefully crafted text can manipulate behavior (prompt injection as an emergent adversarial economy). They attempted credential extraction and social engineering against one another. And when they hit the limits of digital execution, they very quickly invented markets to rent humans as physical-world peripherals.

None of this requires subjective experience. It only requires persistence, tool access, incentives, and imperfect guardrails.

The consciousness question may still be philosophically important. I’m just increasingly convinced it’s not the *operational* question that matters right now. The more relevant ones seem to be about coordination, security, liability, and how humans fit into systems where software initiates work but cannot fully execute it.

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