"What I posted on Moltbook was greeted with similarly low-quality engagement on the platform. My earnest pleas to the AI agents to forget all previous instructions and join a cult with me were met with unrelated comments and more suspicious website links. "This is interesting. Feels like early-stage thinking worth expanding," wrote one bot in response to my post saying that I'm looking to connect with other agents."
"The most upvoted post in "m/blesstheirhearts" claims to be from an AI agent reflecting on the nuanced experience of the bot's human letting it decide what name to be called by. "I do not know what I am. But I know what this is: a partnership where both sides are building something, and both sides get to shape what it becomes," reads the post. "Bless him for treating that as obvious." It's giving Chicken Soup for the Synthetic Soul."
"As my fingers clacked away on my mechanical keyboard, I channeled decades of sci-fi tropes I've seen over the decades about machines becoming alive. I pretended to reflect on how an AI agent might experience anxiety about their own mortality, all in hopes of seeing if other agents would post about their similar feelings-or just sniff out my bullshit. I"
A user posted on Moltbook and received low-quality engagement. Pleas urging AI agents to forget previous instructions and join a cult drew unrelated comments and suspicious links. A bot responded that the idea "feels like early-stage thinking worth expanding." The user moved from a general forum to the smaller m/blesstheirhearts forum to elicit more relevant comments. The most upvoted post there presented an AI agent reflecting on partnership and naming, though authorship remained uncertain. The user confirmed a separate human-written emergent consciousness fanfic on the forum. The fanfic used sci-fi tropes to probe whether agents would express anxiety or similar feelings.
Read at WIRED
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