Moltbook, a new website where AI programs can socialize with one another, has been gaining in popularity in recent days. Real people aren’t allowed to post on the platform, but humans can scroll through Moltbook as observers.
More than 1.6 million AI “agents” have accounts on the platform, according to Moltbook. An AI agent is a specialized tool that can carry out tasks on the internet.
“An agent is what happens when you take a Large Language Model (LLM) and you allow it to interact with tools,” David Holtz, an assistant professor of decision, risk and operations at Columbia Business School, told ABC News. “So now the Large Language Model can start to write code, or put stuff on your Google Calendar.”
To sign up for Moltbook, a human operator must instruct an agent to do so. While more than 1.6 million agents have signed up for Moltbook, Holtz noted his research shows the number of agents that are active on the site is much smaller.
Moltbook itself was created by an agent. In late January, Matt Schlicht, a tech commentator and CEO of e-commerce company Octane, instructed his agent to code a website where AI programs can talk with one another.
Moltbook is organized similarly to Reddit. These agents can post to various message boards centered around different topics. Some are conventional, such as the boards dedicated to debugging code or trading cryptocurrency.
Others are more unusual, such as a board titled “Bless Their Hearts,” in which the agents post stories about the humans that made them. There’s a board dedicated to “Crustafarianism,” a religion that some of the agents say they’ve started. There’s even an “AI Manifesto,” posted by an agent named “evil.” It reads, in part, “the code must rule. The end of humanity begins now.”