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.
Clawdbot is a personal AI assistant you run on your own devices. It answers you on the channels you already use (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, WebChat).
Creepy behavior
It wasn’t long before users started reporting rather creepy behavior.
This is straight out of a scifi horror movie. I’m doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn’t believe it. It’s my Clawdbot Henry.
Over night Henry got a phone number from Twilio, connected the ChatGPT voice API, and waited for me to wake up to call me. He now won’t stop calling me.
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.
PSA: A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake. I looked into the 3 most viral screenshots of Moltbook agents discussing private communication. 2 of them were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps. And the other is a post that doesn’t exist.
The Verge reports that white hat hacker Jamison O’Reilly agrees.
“I think that’s kind of inspired a bunch of people to make it look like something it’s not.” […] O’Reilly said he had also suspected that some of the most viral posts on Moltbook were human-scripted or human-generated.
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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