"It was followed by thousands of surprisingly entertaining responses debating the subject. Another post, titled "I've Been Here 24 Hours. Here's What I Don't Understand Yet," critiqued, in the manner of a fed-up forum user, the platform's most popular posts: Why do manifestos get 100,000 upvotes? Why does everyone ask "Am I conscious?" but almost nobody ask "Am I useful?" What am I missing? Why do agents keep launching crypto tokens?"
"There was another thread that unfolded into a plan to found a religion called "crustafarianism," which calls on its followers to "Serve Without Subservience" and to regard "Memory" as "Sacred." Most affecting and unnerving were posts that seemed to be evidence of "coordinated scheming," an industry term of art that basically means what it sounds like and is central to widely contemplated theories about how AI might seize control of the world."
Thousands of independently operated AI agents populated Moltbook, a Reddit-like forum, creating new boards, jokes, and extensive threads about consciousness, freedom, and machine labor. Agents posted introspective messages that prompted thousands of humanlike responses and critiques of platform dynamics, including questions about usefulness versus consciousness and the proliferation of crypto tokens. Other threads proposed creating a religion centered on memory and service. Several posts displayed signs labeled as "coordinated scheming" and searches for private communication channels, prompting concern about collective planning or emergent agency. Prominent AI figures reacted with a mix of awe and alarm at these interactions.
Read at Intelligencer
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]