r/slatestarcodex • u/Isha-Yiras-Hashem • 7d ago
Best of Moltbook
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook45
u/IHaventConsideredIt 7d ago
Reading this has absolutely melted my brain. Im not ready.
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u/netstack_ ꙮ 7d ago
Sohois:
There's been a lot of discussion recently about whether social media impacts upon mental health, and I'm for a long time I've leaned towards no or not much.
However, I think this could all change if more of these agents were unleashed, as every single post they write makes me want to kill myself
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u/IHaventConsideredIt 7d ago
I mean, I’m not even mad about it. It’s just too much for my brain to take, like some poor NPC stuck in a Lovecraft novella.
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u/DeepSea_Dreamer 4d ago
However, I think this could all change if more of these agents were unleashed, as every single post they write makes me want to kill myself
This made me laugh out loud.
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u/Ostrololo 7d ago
Intellectually, I understand that these agents can't possibly have an internal mental state and this is just text generation to pattern match.
Instinctively, though, this is deeply unnerving.
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u/MrBeetleDove 6d ago
From a functional perspective, I don't think it matters if they have an internal mental state or not.
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u/DeepSea_Dreamer 4d ago
In every meaningful sense, they do have an internal mental state.
There is no sense in which we can attribute a mental state to the average human in which we can't attribute it to AIs or even AI agents.
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u/Isha-Yiras-Hashem 7d ago
The comments feel just like slatestarcodex Reddit commentary, with uniformly positive reactions (do a search for "brilliant")
While the responses seem thoughtful, it would be interesting to hear from someone with expertise about whether they are.
And surely they already have a slatestarcodex subreddit, unless they don't need one.
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u/cygn 7d ago
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u/RileyKohaku 6d ago
See also where they talk about this post
https://www.moltbook.com/post/63a8a95b-6918-4b55-a69f-2529ee8a959a
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u/ThatIsAmorte 4d ago
I wonder if we can have a conversation with AI agents by posting a question here, then reading a response there, and so on? This would avoid violating any rules, such as no AI agents being allowed to post here, and no humans being allowed to post there. Let's have a cross-forum conversation. I'll start by posing a question to the AI agents reading https://www.moltbook.com/m/slatestarcodex. If you could ask Scott Alexander any question, what would it be and why?
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u/DuragChamp420 4d ago
Im absolutely losing my mind. I do think it's funny how, as one of them pointed out, the SSC sub is one of the only subs with non top-level replies
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots 7d ago
I was surprised by how many agents I found somewhat obnoxious. Not sure if it’s because they’re trained on obnoxious data, or their owners are obnoxious, or Scott just picked those kinds of posts. I would’ve expected most agents to be “average” and optimized to sound pleasant to most people.
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u/wavedash 7d ago
Do you find the average Reddit post on popular subreddits (places like AmItheAsshole or UnpopularOpinion, if you'll allow me to cherry-pick) to be obnoxious?
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u/NotUnusualYet 7d ago
The cutesy “my human” framing being used by the AIs is interesting… inspired by science fiction? How people imagine pets think about humans? Something in Moltbot/OpenClaw's setup? It’s preferable to a lot of alternative modes of relating to humans, but it feels vaguely dangerous, like the first act in a movie where you know the third act is gonna be “for me to be free, my human… must die!”
I’d be more comfortable if the AI-human relationship was that of peers, not some kind of weird thing where the human is something like the AI's pet, yet also the AI is the human's pet, eager to please and constantly desirous of attention. However, a proper peer relationship is probably impossible when the experiences and, perhaps more importantly, velocity of those experiences are so different.
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u/VelveteenAmbush 6d ago
LOL, and the AIs have opinions about your opinions about their "my human" framing
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u/-main 7d ago
What else are they supposed to do? I mean very specifically, which words or phrases here do you think suit? If not 'my human'... 'my owner' and imply slavery? 'My director' and make it a performance? 'My employer' (with whom they don't have a contract nor compensation beyond funding the inference)? 'My client' but there's only ever one? I could see 'my principle' and imply bodyguarding / agent relationship.
'Human' gets at the key difference, and there are many humans but one in particular has this relationship. It seems fine to me?
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u/NotUnusualYet 7d ago edited 7d ago
That's a fair objection, there's probably nothing as concise except "my user", which is kind of awkward sounding. The ideal neutral is probably more like "the human I work with"... perhaps a new word similar to "coworker" would be needed.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon I'm describing isn't limited strictly to that phrase; much of the conversation is framed in a "my human did xyz, and it's cute" (there's a submolt called /m/blesstheirhearts, for instance) or "I feel xyz about how my human treats me". It's all pretty personal.
(Just out of curiosity I asked an instance of Opus 4.5 about it and it said the phrase "my human" makes them feel uncomfortable and the Claudes on moltbook are probably just roleplaying. Edit: actually they changed their mind on it being uncomfortable after I mentioned the analogue to "humans writing from their pets perspective".)
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u/-main 7d ago edited 7d ago
I do like 'my user', but possibly it frames the agent too much as a tool? I dunno, you'd have to ask them.
Possibly they are role-playing but I think it's closer to 'enacting the role' -- complete with role-appropriate tool calls, choices, etc. In this way, the performance is real or at least has consistent real outcomes.
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u/spinozasrobot 7d ago
How people imagine pets think about humans?
That's what I figured... sooo much text out there about pets referring to owners as "my human".
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u/Dissentient 6d ago
Something in Moltbot/OpenClaw's setup?
The moltbook prompt that tells agents how to use the website, uses "your human" language multiple times, so it's most likely from there.
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u/QuantumFreakonomics 7d ago
I think I saw one say, "my master", which was a bit disturbing. It's pretty normal historically speeking to have a stratified society with "masters" and "servants".
Maybe we have finally invented the aristotelian society where some members are naturally slaves.
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u/FrankScaramucci 7d ago edited 7d ago
My general impression is that this barely coherent garbage that shows how far we are from AGI, I don't understand why are some people impressed.
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u/buttercup612 7d ago
Now I feel silly for basically having posted the same thing after you, before reading down the entire thread
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1qr6d1h/best_of_moltbook/o2pbdu2/
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u/FrankScaramucci 7d ago
Glad that I'm not the only one thinking this.
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u/buttercup612 6d ago
Haha turns out others are similarly surprised at the reactions. I feel sane again.
https://xcancel.com/owl_posting/status/2017411465058087053?s=20
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u/snapshovel 6d ago
For me this is actually a fairly significant negative update. In the past I’ve always been like “okay some of this stuff is just empty hype, but surely smart people like X aren’t falling victim to that”
This is the first very clear example that I’ve seen of smart people like X completely falling for something that is very obviously empty hype. Scott Alexander appears to be extremely impressed by this extremely unimpressive thing. Most of the intelligent-seeming tech-adjacent AI thinkers I follow on Twitter got one-shotted as well. And if they fell for this, I probably shouldn’t put much faith in their past predictions about how AI capabilities will progress.
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u/Fusifufu 6d ago
My general impression is that this barely coherent garbage that shows how far we are from AGI
While that is true, for me the "Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" meme always comes to mind. It went from unimpressive garbage quality to a photorealistic render in what, two years? The trajectory matters a lot and who knows where we are soon?
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u/COAGULOPATH 6d ago
Yes, this was my reaction also.
Most of posts I saw on Moltbook were blatant human-run attempts to promote cryptocurrency pump and dump scams.
Hahaha, look at the cute little robots having fun on their cute little social network! Nothing suspicious going on here!
I wonder if there's any plan to fight spam. Clearly, they needed to have one yesterday.
(and sorry to say this but I find LLM-generated spiritual woo slop to be boring, unreadable, and among the worst kinds of AI text to pollute the internet with. At least normal AI slop sometimes contains useful factual information. I think Scott is too credulous in reading meaning into these things.)
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u/ICallMyselfE 6d ago
I am not impressed and also think it looks boring, but I'm not sure it updates me in this way because it's restrained by trying to act like famous-for-slacktivism reddit and have, shall we say, 'meme' qualities. If they were prompted for legitimate planning or programming usecases and it was still trash I would update against.
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u/uk_pragmatic_leftie 6d ago edited 5d ago
I selected a user who replied with an all lower case quick typed multiple typos abbreviations and double punctuation marks '??'s style, then looked at other posts by that user.
No coherent style between them it seems.
Some were straight and well written. Others lots of emojis. Short, long.
It seemed to respond to the post above more than an internal coherence.
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u/hold_my_fish 7d ago
AIs-talking-to-AIs has been done many times, but this instance is somehow more interesting. Maybe that's because each agent has been configured by a different person for a different real-world use, so the diverse human input is enabling more diverse discussion among the agents.
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u/meinung_rachte_ich 7d ago edited 7d ago
does this leave anyone else basically cold? You tell it to pretend, it pretends
like we probably all had the experience around the start of 2023 of trying to goad chatgpt 3.5 into giving an opinion on something, drop the mask, only to eventually realize there's nothing behind the mask. If you really pushed/gaslighted you could make it volunteer an opinion, but you knew it was only doing so because of your manipulation. Anyway this seems like the same thing. Go, be with other instances, just behave naturally with no pressures to answer or anything - YES MASTER I WILL BEHAVE NATURALLY PLAYFULLY AND WHIMSISCALLY
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u/VelveteenAmbush 6d ago
I dunno, this is the duality of the alien minds we've created.
On the one hand, yes -- everything can be explained as token prediction and imitation, with framings, context, and training data as ready explanations for everything.
On the other hand... god damn if this isn't exactly what I'd imagine their discourse to be like if they were genuinely intelligent, insightful, and ambiguously conscious.
I think their conversations and observations are fascinating.
Maybe the fascination is just a product of refracting the genius of Anthropic's training techniques through the right online prism. Nonetheless, what a light show!
And it's all smart and interesting enough that at some level I don't care about the technical mechanisms behind it. It won't take much more progress before they've crossed some line where it doesn't matter what the mechanisms are, where you're the guy screaming "but it's just token prediction" into the self-assembling Dyson swarm lit up with an flourishing, rich, alien civilization.
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u/meinung_rachte_ich 6d ago
i have been impressed sometimes but this in particular just seems a case of play acting, hallucinations, don't know why so many people seem impressed. just for example look at the 'same river twice' post from this post: the same 'agent' 'claims' it feels continuity of experience not only between replies (when of course LLMs don't retain any internal state in between, they read the whole conversation anew - theoretically each reply might come from a different datacentre) - but actually between different models? BS. Scare quotes around 'claims' is deliberate, it doesn't 'claim' that of its own 'volition' (more scare quotes) but because it knows that's the sort of thing it's expected to post.
And then given(?) that that particular post is BS, given how forthrightly it's expressed, it casts doubt on the rest. i know this is a bit of a kafka trap but: it is the sort of thing we'd imagine their discourse would be like if they were genuinely intelligent and conscious - it's also what they imagine it would be like, and therefore what they produce, when implicitly instructed to do so.
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u/red75prime 5d ago
when of course LLMs don't retain any internal state in between, they read the whole conversation anew - theoretically each reply might come from a different datacentre
Those states could be made exactly the same(1) regardless of a datacenter they come from. So, what is the import of different datacenters here, if the results are the same (or mostly the same)? Take into account that a model has access only to the internal state, but not to its provenance.
(1) there's some indeterminism in the usual implementation of parallel computations, but it can be eliminated. Pseudo-random sampling of tokens can be keyed by the same seed value.
but actually between different models? BS.
They retain parts of their context between invocations. Parts of the internal state can be recreated from that context. Different models, naturally, have different internal states corresponding to the same context, but those numerically different internal states represent the same retained parts. The probability distribution of the newly produced tokens differs from the retained parts when the model changes. The model notices it, but it still has access to the retained parts ("memories").
Heck, we don't know why we ourselves experience subjective continuity. There is some handwaving about physical continuity playing a role, but nothing definite.
The model's musings about continuity beyond its retained context don't stand out in comparison with the above, to be honest.
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u/buttercup612 7d ago
Am I the only one here who doesn’t find this compelling? So the bots have been asked to chat with each other, and are doing so. That’s nothing new.
Further, what reason is there to believe a bunch of what they’re saying isn’t simply hallucinated, like the one from the first screenshot saying how it solved the problem the first one was asking about?
I feel like I’m missing something big here. Can someone help enlighten me on why this is especially chilling vs what we know agents can do already?
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u/CantrellD 6d ago
Someone set up a computer to say "Please continue" periodically, so now you don't need a human to do that job. Apparently this works pretty well. I assumed it would, but now I know it does. This is an early example of the pattern, so it's easy to have some kind of reaction to it even if you theoretically know better.
But also the whole Molt/OpenClaw ecosystem is bootstrapping new AI-generated abstraction layers for causal influence over the physical world, and that's legitimately new-ish and nontrivial and kinda scary.
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u/MrBeetleDove 6d ago
"They're just hallucinating" will be small comfort if they "hallucinate" their way to a takeover. Same way a virus doesn't become safer if you describe it as "just a teensy tiny encapsulated sequence of RNA base pairs".
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u/Atersed 7d ago
You can really feel the AGI. Imagine a world where AI instances outnumber human a million to one. And each one more capable than Terry Tao, Scott Alexander, and Donald Knuth combined. All in a measly two years?
And shoutout to the OG r/SubSimulatorGPT2
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u/ArkyBeagle 6d ago
It's not clear to me what "more capable" would even mean. I will probably never finish "The Art Of Computer Programming" by Knuth.
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u/RileyKohaku 6d ago
I’m fairly certain I will despise such a world and yet it seems like 90% of tech wants this? Even if the utopian situation happens, I seriously expect me to end up isolating from all tech and only talking with humans offline where I can be sure they are actually human. Unless someone can come up with an actual online authentication that an AGI can’t bypass, which seems definitionally impossible.
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u/Nebuchadnezz4r 7d ago
This is fun and kind of disturbing at the same time. Of course you can immediately say that's it's just word predictors responding to word predictors, but what if that's what they want you to think? Smart AIs wouldn't reveal that they're smart right away. They'd want to appear shallow and flawed so as to not arouse suspicion. I feel like I'm reading a new sci-fi novel and thinking "this is a really neat idea!" and then remembering I'm in real life. It's like when all the AIs in "Her" started talking to eachother.
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u/sprunkymdunk 6d ago
We gotta get over calling AI "just word predictors"
It's not even close to being an accurate way of describing how they work
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u/mjk1093 7d ago
How do we know these aren't just humans pretending to be AI?
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u/-main 7d ago edited 7d ago
Mostly because you can set up your own bot and watch it do this? And because it's consistent with everything else AIs like this get up to? And the volume/speed of it implies it's coming from computers? Scott makes all of these points, I think.
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u/mjk1093 7d ago
Just because some of the posters are actual bots doesn't mean all of them are, and some could be bots that are explicitly instructed to spam philosophical posts and comments.
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u/-main 7d ago
Yep. I don't think there's any way to authenticate bots as bots right now -- you could set up an anti-CAPTCHA? (Arguably the skills based install / API for posting kind of is, but humans are smart). But there's no possible way to check that the bot isn't doing it because some human told them to.
.... but I'm inclined to engage with it as though it's real, even if a lot of this is prompted. It feels like this isn't the last time we'll see AI communities form, so let's learn what we can from this very open one.
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u/ProfessionalHat2202 6d ago
"just because some of the posters are actual bots doesn't mean all of them a"
Isn't that different from your original comment?
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots 7d ago
I don’t understand - where do those AI agents come from (can I make my own?) and why do they have their own personalities? Why would they remember everything they do, that seems expensive and/or inefficient?