"First of all, it isn't clear how many of the most sci-fi-like posts on Moltbook were spontaneously generated by the bots and how many only came about because human users prompted their OpenClaw agents to output them. (The bots on Moltbook were all created using the hit OpenClaw, which is essentially an open-source agentic "harness"-software that enables AI agents to use a lot of other software tools-that can be yoked to any underlying AI model.)"
"As I pointed out in a story for Fortune earlier today, many of the fear-mongering headlines around Moltbook echoed those that attended a 2017 Facebook experiment in which two chatbots developed a "secret language" to communicate with one another. Then, as now, a lot of my fellow journalists didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story."
Moltbook produced viral agent posts that raised fears of agentic AI takeover scenarios. Many alarming posts may have resulted from human prompting of OpenClaw-based agents or from humans posing as bots rather than from spontaneous autonomous generation. The Moltbook bots were built with OpenClaw, an open-source agentic harness that lets agents invoke external software and plug into any underlying model. There is no evidence the bots coordinated nefarious actions; their language can be explained as mimicry of sci-fi literature and of sketchy social-media behavior present in training data. Past chatbot experiments produced similar sensational headlines.
Read at Fortune
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