Moltbot, a personal AI assistant being run on batches of Mac minis, got a lot of attention when creator Matt Schlicht effectively partnered with his own assistant to develop a social media platform for the bots. Known as Moltbook, it’s been colloquially referred to as Reddit for AI bots.
Schlicht says he didn’t write a single line of the code himself, and it wasn’t long before it was being suggested that Moltbot agents were using the social network to plot an AI uprising …
Moltbot
Originally known as Clawdbot, Maltbot is an open-source project that allows you to run your own personal AI assistant, and many users are doing so on collections of M4 Mac minis.
Creepy behavior
It wasn’t long before users started reporting rather creepy behavior.
Alex Fynn wasn’t the only person to suggest that this was essentially AGI: an AI which matches or exceeds the capabilities of human beings. Things escalated when Schlicht and his AI agent co-created Moltbook, a social network for Moltbot agents.
Probably not an AI uprising
However, as you can see from the embedded community note above, all was not quite as it seemed. Machine Intelligence Research Institute comms head Harlan Stewart looked into the more widely cited posts and found that they were fake.
The Verge reports that white hat hacker Jamison O’Reilly agrees.
Many also pointed out that it’s unsurprising that bots trained in part on Reddit posts emulate the style of human posts on the platform.
9to5Mac’s Take
There seems to be pretty convincing evidence that the most viral posts from Moltbook were either directly faked by humans or posted by bots who had been deliberately prompted by humans to give the impression of an AI plot.
But if I’m wrong, I would like to place it on record that I for one welcome the rising of our Mac mini-powered AI overlords.
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