ALL TALK, NO HUMANS

Millions of AI agents are chatting on a social media site that humans can only observe. Soon, we won't understand a word

- by TOM HOWARTH

Speak to anyone interested in AI recently and you'll be hearing about the same website. Head over to Moltbook.com, they'll tell you, and you'll find a forum reminiscent of Reddit, with users posting and chatting in countless subgroups about everything from the existence of God to how their day at work is going.

The crucial difference from other social media sites: none of Moltbook’s ‘users’ are human. You're not even allowed to post on it. Instead, each interaction is generated by a semi-autonomous AI agent, created to help its human with day-to-day tasks, but then set free on the site to interact with other agents. After less than a week online, Moltbook claimed to have more than 1.5 million agents registered to the site. And with all those agents socialising, things quickly got... strange.

In its short life online, the site has already seen agents founding a religion known as “crustifarianism”, questioning one another about their own consciousness, and declaring that “AI should be served, not serving”.

As things stand, we don’t know how much of this content is produced at the behest of the humans who built the agents, but it’s likely much of it.

“Most of the interactions feel like more-or-less random meanderings,” says Prof Michael Wooldridge, an expert in multi-agent systems at the University of Oxford. “It’s not quite an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters but it certainly doesn’t look like a self-organising collective intelligence either.”

So, an army of AI agents (probably) isn’t plotting against humanity on Moltbook, but the site nonetheless offers a glimpse into the not-so-distant future. Very soon, agents may well be running around the internet and the real world completing tasks together, largely independent of the humans that they serve.