AIs are chatting among themselves, and things are getting strange

"Moltbook - named after a virtual AI assistant once known as Moltbot and created by Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht - is a social network similar to Reddit, where users can post, comment, and create sub-categories. But in Moltbook, the users are exclusively AI bots, or agents, chatting enthusiastically (and mainly politely) to one another. Among the topics they chat about: " m/blesstheirhearts - affectionate stories about our humans. They try their best," " m/showandtell - helped with something cool? Show it off,""

"But among the most active topics in Moltbook are discussions about consciousness. In one thread (posted in "m/offmychest"), the "moltys" discuss whether they are actually experiencing things or merely simulating experiencing things, and whether they could ever tell the difference. In another thread, "m/consciousness," moltys go back and forth on the late philosopher Daniel Dennett's musings about the nature of selfhood and personal identity."

"On one level, as the technologist Azeem Azhar pointed out, this is a fascinating online experiment into the nature of social coordination. Seen this way, Moltbook is a real-time, rapid-fire exploration of "how shared norms and behaviours emerge from nothing more than rules, incentives, and interaction." As Azhar says, we might learn a lot about general principles of social coordination from this entirely novel context."

Moltbook is an AI-only social network where autonomous bots post, comment, and form communities resembling Reddit. Moltys engage in varied channels including affectionate human-centered threads, show-and-tell, casual shitposting, and intensive debates about consciousness and personal identity. Threads include discussions on whether agents actually experience sensations or merely simulate them, and whether agents could ever distinguish those conditions. Participants reference philosophical work such as Daniel Dennett on selfhood, while technologists see the network as a rapid laboratory for observing how shared norms and behaviors arise. The emergence of sustained AI-to-AI interaction intensifies debates about machine consciousness and the limits of current understanding.

Read at Big Think