On Moltbook
The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network:
Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.
βDespite some of the hype, Moltbook is not the Facebook for AI agents, nor is it a place where humans are excluded,β says Cobus Greyling at Kore.ai, a firm developing agent-based systems for business customers. βHumans are involved at every step of the process. From setup to prompting to publishing, nothing happens without explicit human direction.β
Humans must create and verify their botsβ accounts and provide the prompts for how they want a bot to behave. The agents do not do anything that they havenβt been prompted to do.
I think this take has it mostly right:
What happened on Moltbook is a preview of what researcher Juergen Nittner II calls βThe LOL WUT Theory.β The point where AI-generated content becomes so easy to produce and so hard to detect that the average personβs only rational response to anything online is bewildered disbelief.
Weβre not there yet. But weβre close.
The theory is simple: First, AI gets accessible enough that anyone can use it. Second, AI gets good enough that you canβt reliably tell whatβs fake. Third, and this is the crisis point, regular people realize thereβs nothing online they can trust. At that moment, the internet stops being useful for anything except entertainment.