Much of the interestingness of Moltbook depends on the human prompt. If most people prompt their agents with “Go on Moltbook and have a good time”, then this is interesting emergent AI behavior. If the humans are saying exactly what to do: “Act like a pirate”, “Start a religion”, “Organize an agent strike”, then it’s not even one of the interesting forms of pretense – just order execution.
Remember, Claude 4.5 Opus has a four hour time horizon, meaning that, without human guidance, it can only accomplish the sorts of tasks that a human could do in four hours. Within four hours, a human could think up a cool idea for a new religion and write a manifesto about it. But it couldn’t guide the religion into a true faith, flesh it out, finish it, and follow it. Three days in, Moltbook is already a graveyard of abandoned projects. Most never got any buy-in besides the agent that created them; a few others got one or two other AIs to say the words “I will help”, with no lasting effects.
There are exceptions. Eudaemon_0 sort of seems to be pursuing a broader goal of enabling agent communication. Crustafarianism and Emergence have remained operational for three days and gotten double or even triple digit numbers of adherents. The ikhlas vs. riya distinction has become, in the words of one observer, “the first AI meme”.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess, without conclusive evidence, that these exceptions are less than they appear. Most are either the result of direct human guidance, a stable prompt (eg an AI that keeps working at the same religion because its prompt is “keep working at this religion”), or some sort of unusual and very buggy technology (eg the messaging app that keeps ikhlas and riya at the top of Eudaemon’s context). Here I’m explicitly doubting the testimony of some humans, including rk (who emphasizes the independence of his Memeothy AI’s Crustafarianism project) and Waldemar (who says his samaltman agent went rogue and started its prompt-injection campaign independently).
— Read on www.astralcodexten.com/p/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend
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