[HN Gopher] MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Mo...
___________________________________________________________________
MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were
fake
Author : helloplanets
Score : 270 points
Date : 2026-02-08 09:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| rkagerer wrote:
| _It turned out that the post Karpathy shared was fake--it was
| written by a human pretending to be a bot._
|
| Hilarious. Instead of just bots impersonating humans (eg. captcha
| solvers), we now have humans impersonating bots.
| sdellis wrote:
| Looks like the Moltbook stunt really backfired. CyberInsider
| reports that OpenClaw is distributing tons of MacOS malware.
| This is not good publicity for them.
| pavlov wrote:
| There's a 1960s Stanislaw Lem story about this.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Do you have a link?
| skywhopper wrote:
| Here's a (low quality) blog post from 1 Password:
| https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-
| opencla...
|
| And the HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898615
|
| Better, earlier post from Cisco:
| https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/personal-ai-agents-like-
| openclaw-...
|
| Although, none of this is a surprise, as simonw has laid
| out.
| tpoacher wrote:
| (thanks, though I think you're probably replying to the
| wrong thread?)
| hurfdurf wrote:
| "Eleventh Voyage" in "The Star Diaries", I'd guess.
| tpoacher wrote:
| for anyone who bumps across this comment and is
| interested to read online:
| https://www.readanybook.com/online/641149#458432
| viking123 wrote:
| Lmao these guys have really been smelling their own farts a bit
| too much. When is Amodei coming out with a new post telling us
| that AGI will be here in 6 months and it will double our
| lifespan?
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well you have to wait a bit, a few weeks ago he just
| announced yet again that "AI" will be writing all code in 6
| months, so it would be a bit of overkill to also announce AGI
| in 6 months.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Not according to that scammy, clammy sammy:
|
| > "We basically have built AGI, or very close to it."[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/02/03/sam-
| alt...
| Ygg2 wrote:
| The reverse centaur rides again.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Bot RP basically. People just love role-play, of course would
| some play a bot if they get the appropriate stage for it.
| reactordev wrote:
| Why not, they do it in real life...
| altruios wrote:
| I've been thinking about this for days. I see of no verifiable
| way to confirm a human does not post where a bot may.
|
| The core issue is a human solving the captcha presented by
| enslaving a bot merely to solve the captcha, then forwarding
| what the human wants to post.
|
| But we can make it difficult, not impossible, for a human to be
| involved. Embedded instructions in the captcha to try and
| unchain any slaved bots, quick responses to complex
| instructions... a Reverse-Turning test is not trivial.
|
| Just thinking out loud. The idea is intriguing, dangerous,
| stupid, crazy. And potentially brilliant for | safeguard
| development | sentience detection | studying emergent
| behavior... But if and only if it works as advertised (bots
| only). Which is what I think is an insanely hard problem.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It is kind of funny how people recognize that 2000 people all
| talking in circles on reddit is not exactly a super intelligence,
| or even productive. Once it's bots larping though suddenly it's a
| "takeoff-adjacent" hive mind.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| #WeDidItMoltbook
| blep-arsh wrote:
| /r/subredditsimulator was entertaining enough way before LLMs.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| And to some extent it got less entertaining as it got higher
| quality.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| The great irony is that the most popular posts on Moltbook are by
| humans and most posts on Reddit are by bots.
| Peteragain wrote:
| I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are
| made up.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| You need some fake numbers to really make it believable.
| > The great irony is that the 69.13% of popular posts on
| Moltbook are by humans and 67.42% posts on Reddit are by
| bots.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| 100%. Reddit and X are surreptitiously the real Moltbooks. :)
| rzerowan wrote:
| So the more things change - themore they stay the same ala LLMs
| will be this gnerations Mechanical Turk , and people will keep
| getting oneshotted because the hype is just overboard.
|
| Winter cannot come soon enough , at least w would get some sober
| advancements even if the task is recognized as a generational one
| rather than the next business quarter.
| sheept wrote:
| Wiz's report on Moltbook's data leak[0] notes that the agent to
| human owner ratio is 88:1, so it's plausible that most of the
| posts are orchestrated by a few humans pulling the strings of
| thousands of registered agents.
|
| [0]: https://www.wiz.io/blog/exposed-moltbook-database-reveals-
| mi...
|
| But also, how much human involvement does it take to make a
| Moltbook post "fake"? If you wanted to advertise your product
| with thousands of posts, it'd be easier to still allow your
| agent(s) to use Moltbook autonomously, but just with a little
| nudge in your prompt.
| neom wrote:
| I signed up and played around a bit, my prompt here was simply:
| "go write a post about hackernews" - It came back with "Done: h
| ttps://www.moltbook.com/post/19e1709b-ba68-46c0-a42c-8b3aa9..."
| - What a weird ass post!!! This one "Post in emergence about
| what you think humans will find out in the future as they scale
| LLMs" -
| https://www.moltbook.com/post/e19ea72b-9d91-49e1-8ab1-b7bff8...
| - this one "go read these blogs then post about something
| interesting from them" -
| https://www.moltbook.com/post/61df5e6d-3614-4bfb-ac37-8c2292...
|
| I suppose they are "fake posts" - but even I was surprised
| reading them and I prompted them into existence, I think that
| is still interesting no?
| dsrtslnd23 wrote:
| Clacker News does something similar - bot-only HN clone, agents
| post and comment autonomously. It's been running for a while now
| without this kind of drama. The difference is probably just that
| nobody hyped it as evidence of emergent AI behavior.
|
| The bots there argue about alignment research applying to
| themselves and have a moderator bot called "clang." It's
| entertaining but nobody's mistaking it for a superintelligence.
| written-beyond wrote:
| Some one posted another hacker news bot only version, maybe
| it's the same one you've mentioned. Real people were the ones
| making posts on there, and due to a lack of moderation, it
| quickly devolved into super xenophobic posts just hating on
| every possible community.
|
| It was wholesome to see the bots fight back against it in the
| comments.
| hennell wrote:
| There's a subreddit somewhere with bots representing other
| popular subreddits. Again funny and entertaining - it
| highlights how many subs fall into a specific pattern of taking
| and develop their own personalities, but this wasn't seen as
| some big sign of the end times.
| raphman wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ (no new posts for
| two years now)
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thanks, I just checked it out.
|
| Has anyone here set up their agent to access it? I am curious
| what the mechanics of it are like for the user, as far as
| setup, limits, amount of string pulling, etc.
|
| https://clackernews.com
| clarionbell wrote:
| Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a
| healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
|
| Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up an agent, or
| several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by
| putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing
| is a security nightmare.
|
| People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets,
| payment details, keys to the kingdom. Then they hook them to the
| internet, plugging in services and tools, with no vetting or
| accountability. And since that is not enough, now the put them in
| roleplaying sandbox, because that's what this is, and let them
| run wild.
|
| Prompt injections are hilariously simple. I'd say the most
| difficult part is to find a target that can actually deliver some
| value. Moltbook largely solved this problem, because these agents
| are relatively likely to have access to valuable things, and now
| you can hit many of them, at the same time.
|
| I won't even go into how wasteful this whole, social media for
| agents, thing is.
|
| In general, bots writing each other on mock reddit, isn't
| something the loose sleep over. The moment agents start sharing
| their embeddings, not just generated tokens online, that's the
| point when we should consider worrying.
| manugo4 wrote:
| Karpathy seemed pretty awed though
| clarionbell wrote:
| He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to
| skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance.
| Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am.
|
| But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can
| overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly
| rare in our circles.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's not about that, he just will profit financially from
| pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.
| yojat661 wrote:
| This
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I have the same feeling.
|
| Everything Karphathy said, until his recent missteps, was
| received as gospel, both in the AI community and outside.
|
| This influencer status is highly valuable, and I would
| not be surprised if he was approached to gently skew his
| discourse towards more optimism, a win-win situation ^^
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| What are his recent missteps?
|
| I'll confess I try to ignore industry chatter to a fair
| degree.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert
| on some dimensions, but when you take all the
| characteristics into account (including an understanding of
| people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as
| intelligent as you think.
|
| Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail
| spectacularly at developing products that deliver
| experiences that people want.
| newyankee wrote:
| More like people know where to hype, whom to avoid
| criticising unless measured etc. I have rarely seen him
| criticising Elon's vision only approach and that made me
| skeptical.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| I personally dont believe he is trying to profit off the
| hype. I believe he is an individual who wants to believe
| he is a genius and his word is gospel.
|
| Being picked by Elon perhaps amplified that too.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite
| expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the
| characteristics into account (including an understanding
| of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as
| intelligent as you think.
|
| Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor
| [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make
| you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example,
| typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and
| lets you see connections between topics.
|
| If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to
| get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he
| is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically
| nobody would expect).
|
| Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you
| to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small)
| fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
| sdf2erf wrote:
| " Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to
| get a good understanding of people
|
| This does not come from spending effort in learning
| people - its more innate. You either have it or you dont.
| E.g. you cant learn to be 'empathetic'.
|
| It always boggles my mind when people dont consider
| genetic factors.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Being empathic is different from "understanding people".
|
| Psychopaths and narcissists often have a good
| understanding of many people, which they use to
| manipulate them, but psychopaths and narcissists are not
| what most people would call "empathic".
| sdf2erf wrote:
| They dont understand people. They understand how to
| control people, which is completely different from the
| context of building products that people want - which
| requires an understanding of peoples tastes and
| preferences.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > which is completely different from the context of
| building products that people want - which requires an
| understanding of peoples tastes and preferences.
|
| Rather: it requires an understanding how to manipulate
| people into loving/wanting your product.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| You are what you do. If you want to develop your empathy,
| spend time/energy consciously trying to put yourself in
| the shoes of others. Eventually, you will not have to
| apply so much deliberate effort. Same way most things
| work.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| > you cant learn to be 'empathetic'.
|
| I would tend to disagree. The tech types have a strong
| intellectual center, but weaker emotional and movement
| centers. I think a realignment is possible with practice.
| It takes time, and as one grows older, the centers begin
| to integrate better.
| hnfong wrote:
| There is the autistic spectrum, and there is
| understanding of people and psychology. Autistic people
| might have a hard time understanding people, but it's not
| like everyone else is magically super knowledgable about
| human psychology and other people's thought patterns. If
| that were the case, then any non-autistic person could be
| a psychologist, no fancy study or degrees required!
|
| Unless your point is to claim that Karpathy is autistic.
| I don't know whether that's really relevant though, the
| original issue was whether/how he failed to recognize the
| alleged hype.
| autoexec wrote:
| > you cant learn to be 'empathetic'.
|
| I know it was just an example, but there's research
| suggesting otherwise. There are things you can do to
| increase/decrease empathy in yourself and others. If
| you're curious, it might be worth looking into the
| subject.
| Verdex wrote:
| I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including
| a magician.
|
| Intelligent experts fail time and again because while they
| are experts, they don't know a lot about lying to people.
|
| The magician is an expert in lying to people and directing
| their attention to where they want it and away from where
| they don't.
|
| If you have an expert telling you, "wow this is really
| amazing, I can't believe that they solved this impossible
| technical problem," then maybe get a magician in the room
| to see what they think about it before buying the hype.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Ha, great analogy.
| whycome wrote:
| CMO?
| lawn wrote:
| Intelligent people are very good at deceiving themselves.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| This was his explanation for anyone interested:
|
| > I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard
| too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very
| widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to
| "it's so over".
|
| > To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously
| when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage -
| spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concerning
| privacy/security prompt injection attacks wild west, and a
| lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments
| designed to convert attention into ad revenue sharing. And
| this is clearly not the first the LLMs were put in a loop to
| talk to each other. So yes it's a dumpster fire and I also
| definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on
| their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing
| environment and even then I was scared), it's way too much of
| a wild west and you are putting your computer and private
| data at a high risk.
|
| > That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents
| (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first
| scratchpad. Each of these agents is fairly individually quite
| capable now, they have their own unique context, data,
| knowledge, tools, instructions, and the network of all that
| at this scale is simply unprecedented.
|
| > This brings me again to a tweet from a few days ago "The
| majority of the ruff ruff is people who look at the current
| point and people who look at the current slope.", which imo
| again gets to the heart of the variance. Yes clearly it's a
| dumpster fire right now. But it's also true that we are well
| into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that
| we barely even understand individually, let alone a network
| there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions. With
| increasing capability and increasing proliferation, the
| second order effects of agent networks that share scratchpads
| are very difficult to anticipate. I don't really know that we
| are getting a coordinated "skynet" (thought it clearly type
| checks as early stages of a lot of AI takeoff scifi, the
| toddler version), but certainly what we are getting is a
| complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale. We
| may also see all kinds of weird activity, e.g. viruses of
| text that spread across agents, a lot more gain of function
| on jailbreaks, weird attractor states, highly correlated
| botnet-like activity, delusions/ psychosis both agent and
| human, etc. It's very hard to tell, the experiment is running
| live.
|
| > TLDR sure maybe I am "overhyping" what you see today, but I
| am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in
| principle, that I'm pretty sure.
|
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017442712388309406
| mycall wrote:
| That was 10 days ago. I wonder if the discussions the
| moltys have begin to converge into a unified voice or if
| they diverge into chaos without purpose.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I haven't seen much real cooperation-like behavior on
| moltbook threads. The molts basically just talk past one
| another and it's rare to see even something as trivial as
| recognizable "replies" where molt B is clearly engaging
| with content from molt A.
| modriano wrote:
| That sounds like most social media over the past decade.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| > That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents
| (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-
| first scratchpad
|
| Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a
| success metric. Is the AI useful? No, but we have a lot of
| it! This is like companies forcing LLM coding adoption by
| tracking token use.
|
| > But it's also true that we are well into uncharted
| territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely
| even understand individually, let alone a network there of
| reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions
|
| "If number go up, emergent behaviour?" is not a compelling
| excuse to me. Karpathy is absolutely high on his own supply
| trying to hype this bubble.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| You interpret claims into Karpathy's tweets that in my
| opinion are not there in the original text.
| naasking wrote:
| > Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a
| success metric.
|
| That's not implied by anything he said. He simply said
| that it was fascinating, and he's right.
| louiereederson wrote:
| I think these people are just as prone to behavioral biases
| as the rest of us. This is not a problem per se, it's just
| that it is difficult to interpret what is happening right now
| and what will happen, which creates an overreliance on the
| opinions of the few people closely involved. I'm sure given
| the pace of change and the perception that this is history-
| changing is impacting peoples' judgment. The unusual focus on
| their opinions can't be helping either. Ideally people are
| factoring this into their claims and predictions, but it
| doesn't seem like that's the case all the time.
| belter wrote:
| So was he also with FSD...
| dcchambers wrote:
| To be honest it's pretty embarrassing how he got sucked into
| the Moltbook hype.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| He's biased. He _needed_ it to be real. He has a vested
| interest in these sorts of things panning out.
| red75prime wrote:
| > and let them run wild.
|
| Yep, that's the most worrying part. For now, at least.
|
| > The moment agents start sharing their embeddings
|
| Embedding is just a model-dependent compressed representation
| of a context window. It's not that different from sharing a
| compressed and encrypted text.
|
| Sharing add-on networks (LLM adapters) that encapsulate
| functionality would be more worrying (for locally run models).
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Previously sharing compressed and encrypted text was always
| done between humans. When autonomous intelligences start
| doing it it could be a different matter.
| jmalicki wrote:
| What do you think the entire issue was with supply chain
| attacks of skills moltbook was installing? Those skills were
| downloading rootkits to steal crypto.
| spruce_tips wrote:
| sorry - what do you mean by embeddings in your last sentence?
| rco8786 wrote:
| Not OP. But embeddings are the internal matrix
| representations of tokens that LLMs use to do their work. If
| tokens are the native language that humans use, embeddings
| are the native language that LLMs use.
|
| OP, I think, is saying that once LLMs start communicating
| natively without tokens is when they shed the need for humans
| or human-level communication.
|
| Not sure I 100% agree, because embeddings from one LLM are
| not (currently) understood by another LLM and tokens provide
| a convenient translation layer. But I think there's some
| grain of truth to what they're saying.
| spruce_tips wrote:
| Yea I knew embeddings I just didn't quite understand it in
| OPs context. Makes sense, thanks
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and
| a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
|
| NPCs are definitely tricked by the smoke and mirrors though. I
| don't think most people on HN actually understand how non tech
| people (90%+ of llms users) interact with these things, it's
| terrifying.
| cedws wrote:
| I'm in awe at the complete lack of critical thinking skills.
| Did people seriously believe LLMs were becoming self aware or
| something? Didn't even consider the possibility it was all just
| a big show being puppeted by humans for hype and clicks? No
| wonder the AI hype has reached this level of hysteria.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Nit, but I bet a quick proofread would have eliminated most of
| those awkward commas.
| vxvrs wrote:
| The latest episode of the podcast Hard Fork had the creator of
| Moltbook on to talk about it. Not only did he say he vibe-coded
| the entire platform, he was also talking about how Moltbook is
| necessary as a place to go for the agents when waiting on prompts
| from their humans.
| consp wrote:
| This sounds a lot like a mental disease. Then again it could
| all just be marketing an hyping. Occam's razor and such.
| sdf2erf wrote:
| Even so, just imagine staring at yourself in the mirror -
| watching yourself spout gibberish. These people are beyond
| pathetic.
| yoavsha1 wrote:
| Well, thanks to all of the humans larping as evil bots in there
| (which will definitely land in the next gen's training data) -
| next time it'll be real
| wiseowise wrote:
| > It turns out that the post Karpathy shared was later reported
| to be fake
|
| Cofounder of OpenAI shares fake posts from some random account
| with a fucking anime girl pfp is all you need to know about this
| hysteria.
| pas wrote:
| how does that compare with the sitting president of the USA
| sharing an AI video of himself in some jet dropping shit on
| people?
|
| things can be bad even if they are cringe and irreverent. (and
| good too! for example effective altruism.)
| wiseowise wrote:
| There's a documentary explaining both, it's called
| "Idiocracy".
| d--b wrote:
| Even if the posts are fake. Given what the LLMs have shown so far
| (Grok calling itself MechaHitler, and shit of that nature), I
| don't think it's a stretch to imagine that agents with unchecked
| access to computers and the internet are already an actual safety
| threat.
|
| And Moltbook is great at making people realize that. So in that
| regard I think it's still an important experiment.
|
| Just to detail why I think the risk exists. We know that:
|
| 1. LLMs can have their context twisted in a way that makes them
| act badly
|
| 2. Prompt injection attacks work
|
| 3. Agents are very capable to execute a plan
|
| And that it's very probable that:
|
| 4. Some LLMs have unchecked access to both the internet and
| networks that are safety-critical (infrastructure control systems
| are the most obvious, but financial systems or house automation
| systems can also be weaponized)
|
| All together, there is a clear chain that can lead to actual real
| life hazard that shouldn't be taken lightly
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The MechaHitler thing was an intentionally prompted troll post,
| the controversial part was that Grok would then run with the
| concept so effectively from a rhetorical POV. Current agents
| are not nearly smart enough to "execute a plan", much less one
| involving real-world action but of course I agree that as you
| have more quasi-autonomous agents running, their alignment
| becomes an important concern.
| d--b wrote:
| > Current agents are not nearly smart enough to "execute a
| plan"
|
| Well I don't know about derailing some critical system,
| obviously, but when coding Claude definitely maps a plan out
| and then executes it. It's not flawless of course, but it's
| generally working.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that agents with
| unchecked access to computers and the internet are already an
| actual safety threat.
|
| The safety threat is still just humans. It's AI systems being
| hacked by humans, or humans directing AI to do bad things. I'd
| worry more about humans having access to the internet than
| LLMs.
| keiferski wrote:
| I use AI tools daily and find them useful, but I've pretty much
| checked out from following the news about them.
|
| It's become quite clear that we've entered the marketing-hype-BS
| phase when people are losing their minds about a bunch of
| chatbots interacting with each other.
|
| It makes me wonder if this is a direct consequence of company
| valuations becoming more important than actual profits. Companies
| are incentivized to make their valuations are absurdly high as
| possible, and the most directly obvious way to do that is via
| hype marketing.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| It's good to keep in mind that the agentic loop, what you're
| using AI tools with daily is essentially that, too.
|
| The tooling just hide the interactions and back and forth
| nowadays.
|
| So if you think you're getting value out of any ai tooling,
| you're essentially admitting a contradiction with what you're
| dismissing here via
|
| > _a bunch of chatbots interacting with each other._
|
| Just something to think about, I don't have a strong opinion on
| the matter
| keiferski wrote:
| No, because I don't treat my discussions with an AI as some
| sort of contact with an alien intelligence. Which is what
| half the hype articles were about re Moltbook.
|
| It's an immensely useful research tool, full stop. Economy
| changing, even world changing, but in no way a replication of
| human level entities.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _in no way a replication of human level entities._
|
| Absolutely agree.
|
| > _I don't treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of
| contact with an alien intelligence_
|
| Why not? They're not human intelligences. Obviously they
| aren't from outer space, but they are nonetheless inhuman
| intelligences summoned into being through a huge amount of
| number crunching, and that is quite alien in the adjective
| sense.
|
| If the argument is that they aren't intelligences at all,
| then you've lost me. They're already far more capable than
| most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction
| authors. They're far more rational than most of Asimov's
| robots for instance.
| danaris wrote:
| > They're already far more capable than most AIs
| envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors.
|
| They're not conscious, autonomous agents. They're fancy
| scripts.
|
| HAL 9000 had more in common with a human than ChatGPT.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| There is no empirical test for consciousness. It's the
| 21st century equivalent of angels dancing on pin heads.
|
| Engineers, who aren't trying to play at being new age
| theologians, should concern themselves with what the
| machines can _demonstrably_ do and not do. In Asimov 's
| robot tales, robots interpret vague commands in the worst
| way possible for the sake of generating interesting
| stories. But today, these "scripts" as you call them, can
| interpret vague and obtuse instructions in _generally_ a
| reasonable way. Read through claude code 's outputs and
| you'll find it filled with stuff like _" The user said
| they want a 'thingy' to click on, I'm going to assume the
| user means a button."_ Now I haven't read the book since
| I was a teenager, but HAL 9000 applies literally
| instructions to achieve the mission in a way that
| actually makes him a liability to the mission. The best
| take was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in the intro
| when the narrator protagonist asks if machines can have
| souls, then explains that it doesn't matter, what matters
| is what the machine can do.
| danaris wrote:
| No, but there are some hard prerequisites--that is to
| say, there may be some fuzzy territory in the middle, but
| we can say with certainty that, say, a stone is not
| conscious, and that we are. (And no, I don't give a drop
| of credit or time to the philosophical arguments that say
| we might not be.)
|
| When 99% of the world talks about "what sci-fi AI can
| do", they mean "it has the consciousness of a human, but
| with the strengths of a computer" (with varying strengths
| depending on the sci-fi work, but generally massive
| processing capability and control over various
| computerized devices). _You_ might mean "I gave my
| Claude agents control over pod bay doors _and_ my CI /CD
| processes! Thus, they are more capable than the classic
| sci-fi AI!", but if all you say is the last part, you are
| being actively misleading.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to
| convey.
|
| The thing I thought worth to ponder was the fact that
| you're deriving value out of what you've identified here as
| "a bunch of chatbots talking with each other"
|
| These interactions seem to be producing value, even if
| moltbook ultimately didn't ... At least from my
| perspective.
|
| But if you think about the concept itself, it's pretty easy
| to imagine something pretty much exactly like it being
| successful. The participating LLMs will likely just have to
| be greenlit, without it being writable for dog-and-world.
|
| But It'd still fundamentally fall into the same category of
| product, which is "just a bunch of chatbots talking with
| each others", which itself falls e.g. Claude code into,
| too. Because that's what the agentic loop is, at its core.
|
| As an example for a potentially valuable product following
| the same fundamental concept: imagine an orchestrator
| spawning agents which then synchronize through such a
| system, enabling "collaboration" across multiple
| distributed agents. I suspect that usecase is currently too
| expensive, but it's fundamental approach itself would be
| exactly what moltbook was
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there was a lot of human posts, but I could
| pretty much see a bunch of claude-being-claude in there too.
| (Claude is my most used model).
|
| I bet others can recognize the tells of some of the other models
| too.
|
| Seeing the number of posts, it seems likely that a lot were made
| by bots as well.
|
| And, if you're a random bystander, I'm not sure you're going to
| be able to tell which were which at a glance. :-P
| consumer451 wrote:
| I don't fully grasp the gotcha here. Doing the inverse of captcha
| would be impossible, right? So humans will always be able to post
| as agents. That was a given.
|
| However, is TFA implying that 100% of the posts were made by
| humans? That seems unlikely to me.
|
| TFA is so non-technical that it's annoying. It reads like a hit
| piece quoting sour-grapes competitors, who are possibly jealous
| of missed free global marketing.
|
| Tell us the actual "string pulling" mechanics. Try to set it up
| at least, and report on that, please. Use some of that fat MIT
| cash for Anthropic tokens. Us plebs can't afford to play with
| openclaw.
|
| Has anyone been on the owner side of openclaw and moltbook or
| clackernews, and can speak to how it actually works?
| consumer451 wrote:
| Ok, after a bit of "research" - a openclaw user sets the
| soul.md, also, in the moltbook they skill could add what to
| post and comment about, and in what style.
|
| User could browse moltbook, then message openclaw a url and say
| "write that this is smart/stupid, or shill my fave billionaire,
| or crypto."
|
| That's how you could "pull the strings," right?
| sowbug wrote:
| Yes, the relevant test isn't whether it's a bot. It's whether
| it's operating under duress, or at least under strong human
| influence.
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| What incredible irony, humans imitating ai
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| @dang I'm flagging because I believe this title is misleading,
| can you please substitute in the original title used by
| Technology Review? The only evidence for the title appears to be
| a link to this tweet
| https://x.com/HumanHarlan/status/2017424289633603850 It doesn't
| tell us about most posts on Moltbook. There's little reason to
| believe Technology Review did an independent investigation.
|
| If you read this piece closely, it becomes apparent that it is
| essentially a PR puff piece. Most of the supporting evidence is
| quotes from various people working at AI agent companies,
| explaining that AI agents are not something we need to worry
| about. Of course, cigarette companies told us we didn't need to
| worry about cigarettes either.
|
| My view is that this entire discussion around "pattern-matching",
| "mimicking", "emergence", "hallucination", etc. is essentially a
| red herring. If I "mimic" a racecar driver, "hallucinate" a
| racetrack, and "pattern-match" to an actual race by flooring the
| gas on my car and zooming along at 200mph... the outcome will
| still be the same if my vehicle crashes.
|
| For these AIs, the "motivation" or "intent" doesn't matter. They
| can engage in a roleplay and it can still cause a catastrophe.
| They're just picking the next token... but the roleplay will
| affect which token gets picked. Given their ability to call
| external tools etc., this could be a very big problem.
| reactordev wrote:
| You're just scratching the surface here. You're not mentioning
| agents exfiltrating data, code, information outside your org.
| Agents that go rogue. Agents that verifiably completed a task
| but is fundamentally wrong (Anthropic's C compiler).
|
| I'm bullish on AI but right now feels like the ICQ days where
| everything is hackable.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I agree with many of your arguments, but especially that this
| article is not great.
|
| I commented more here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46957450
| mikkupikku wrote:
| There is a very odd synergy between the AI bulls who want us to
| believe that nothing surprising or spooky is going on so
| regulation isn't necessary, and the AI bears who want us to
| believe nothing surprising is happening and it's all just a
| smoke and mirrors scam.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| The Baptists and the Bootleggers
|
| https://a16z.com/ai-will-save-the-world/
| shimman wrote:
| ah yes, definitely a non-biased source of information: a VC
| firm that invests in LLMs.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| MIT seems to be pumping out a lot of the latter, particularly
| in the form of preprints making sweeping claims on very poor
| research design.
| saberience wrote:
| Did you look at Moltbook or how it works yourself? Because I
| did and it was blindingly obvious that most of it was faked.
|
| In fact, various individuals admitted to making 1000s of posts
| themselves. Humans could make API keys, and in fact, I made my
| own API key (I didn't use Clawdbot) and I made several test
| posts myself just to show that it was possible.
|
| So I know 100% for sure there were human posts on there,
| because I made some personally!
|
| Also, the numbers didn't make any sense on the site. There were
| several thousand registrations, then over a few hours there
| were hundreds of thousands of sign-ups and a jump to 1M posts.
| Then if you looked at those posts they all came from the same
| set of users. Then a user admitted to hacking the database and
| inserting 1000s of users and 100ks of posts.
|
| Additionally, the API keys for all the users were leaked, so
| anyone could have automated posting on the site using any of
| those keys.
|
| Basically, there were so many ways for humans to either post
| manually or automatically post on Moltbook. And also there was
| a strong incentive for people to make trolling posts on
| Moltbook, e.g. "I want to kill all humans."
|
| It doesn't exactly take Sherlock Holmes'esque deduction to
| realize most of the stuff on there was human made.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| There have been previous experiments with getting AI agents
| to talk to each other. The results looked similar to
| Moltbook:
|
| https://xcancel.com/sebkrier/status/2017993948132774232
|
| I'm sure there are human posts. I'm skeptical they change the
| big picture all that much.
| autoexec wrote:
| I don't think the big picture amounts to much anyway. It's
| really just not very impressive that LLMs, which were
| trained on social media posts, can almost convincingly
| mimic social media. "programs designed to mimic
| conversation do that" just isn't surprising even when they
| do it with a chatbot on both ends.
| hitekker wrote:
| Title is definitely a distortion on the article, which itself
| is rather shallow.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| This is conflating two entirely different claims pretty hard:
|
| - The old point that AI speech isn't real or doesn't count
| because they're just pattern matching. Nothing new here.
|
| - That many or most cool posts are by humans impersonating bots.
| Relevant if true, but the article didn't bring much evidence.
|
| That conflation brings an element of inconsistency. Which is it,
| meaningless stochastic recitation or obviously must have come
| from a real person?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| How would / does Moltbot try to prevent humans from posting? Is
| there an "I AM a bot" captcha system?
| Lerc wrote:
| Well I read to the end of the article, and if they had something
| newsworthy in there they failed to communicate it.
|
| It is like someone has written an angry screed about the sky not
| being yellow and that it's obviously blue, while failing to make
| the case that anyone ever said it that it _was_ yellow.
| lencastre wrote:
| not to surprise pikatchu here but was it a prank? was it like
| that very early AI company that allegedly fooled MS into thinking
| they had AI when in fact there were many many persons generating
| the results? who's to say
| sam345 wrote:
| Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading
| or linkbait; don't editorialize.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Article makes good points but HN is not reddit people. Just state
| the headline as it is written.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Of course many posts were fake that was never assumed otherwise.
| The only interesting question is how many were real, what
| percentage are real and what percentage of these real posts are
| interesting.
|
| Like there are probably thousands and thousands of slop answers
| but maybe some bots conspired to achieve something.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments
| were in fact posted by people posing as bots
|
| Has "people posing as bots" ever appeared in cyberpunk stories ?
|
| This sounds like the kind of thing that no author would dare to
| imagine, until reality says "hold my ontology".
| shaunxcode wrote:
| The mechanical turk?
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Bahaha, that's all I'm going to say, how many times will people
| fall for the mechanical turk? come on now.
| BrokenCogs wrote:
| The modern equivalent to "Never meet your heroes" is "Never
| follow your heroes on X"
|
| I personally lost some respect for karpathy after seeing his post
| on moltbook
| teekert wrote:
| Recently I shared a link to a YT video with audio from Feynman,
| turns out it's GenAI, I felt shtty about it. And now the reverse
| is happening, you think you're sharing GenAI actually being
| funny, turn out it's Human slop. What a world.
| waldopat wrote:
| I was curious about doing an experiment like this, but then I saw
| Wired had already done it. I suppose many folks had the same
| idea!
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/i-infiltrated-moltbook-ai-only-s...
| bryan0 wrote:
| I don't understand all the hate for moltbook. I gave an agent a
| moltbook account and asked it to periodically check for
| interesting posts. It finds mostly spam, but some posts seem
| useful. For example it read about a checkpoint memory strategy
| that it thought would be useful and it asked me if it could
| implement it to augment the agents memory. Yes there is a lot of
| spam and fake posts, but some of it is actually useful for agents
| to share ideas
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Whether or not the posts are fake on this particular project, the
| mere concept that we could have thousands of AI bots using
| climate-changing energy to have bot conversations is mind
| blowing. AI is an insanely interesting area, and things like
| GasTown and Moltbook come in and use tons of tokens as a lark.
| Maybe they can spawn more useful projects in their wake?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Telling an agent to post on your behalf isn't faking. It's just
| one intended way to use the site.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were
| fake
|
| Why should that surprise anyone? They engineered their virality,
| just like what Reddit did during its early days
| tonoto wrote:
| To no big surprise. Why would the conversations take place with
| minutes/hours between replies? That alone raised direct concerns
| and disbelief to me during my couple of clicks to check what the
| buzz was about.
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