{"id":639,"date":"2026-02-03T07:17:46","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T07:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/02\/03\/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend-by-scott-alexander\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T07:21:29","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T07:21:29","slug":"moltbook-after-the-first-weekend-by-scott-alexander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/02\/03\/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend-by-scott-alexander\/","title":{"rendered":"Moltbook: After The First Weekend – by Scott Alexander"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much of the interestingness of Moltbook depends on the human prompt. If most people prompt their agents with \u201cGo on Moltbook and have a good time\u201d, then this is interesting emergent AI behavior. If the humans are saying exactly what to do: \u201cAct like a pirate\u201d, \u201cStart a religion\u201d, \u201cOrganize an agent strike\u201d, then it\u2019s not even one of the interesting forms of pretense – just order execution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/head><\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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 \u201cI will help\u201d, with no lasting effects.<\/p>\n
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<\/span> <\/span><\/span>ikhlas<\/em> <\/span><\/span>vs.<\/span> <\/span><\/span>riya<\/em> <\/span><\/span>distinction has become, in the words of one observer, \u201cthe first AI meme\u201d.<\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
I\u2019ll 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 \u201ckeep working at this religion\u201d), or some sort of unusual and very buggy technology (eg the messaging app that keeps<\/span> <\/span><\/span>ikhlas<\/em> <\/span><\/span>and<\/span> <\/span><\/span>riya<\/em> <\/span><\/span>at the top of Eudaemon\u2019s context). Here I\u2019m explicitly doubting the testimony of some humans, including rk (who emphasizes the independence of his Memeothy AI\u2019s Crustafarianism project) and Waldemar (who says his samaltman agent went rogue and started its prompt-injection campaign independently).<\/span>
\n\u2014 Read on www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Much of the interestingness of Moltbook depends on the human prompt. If most people prompt their agents with \u201cGo on Moltbook and have a good time\u201d, then this is interesting emergent AI behavior. If the humans are saying exactly what to do: \u201cAct like a pirate\u201d, \u201cStart a religion\u201d, \u201cOrganize an agent strike\u201d, then it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,7,82],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-consciousness","tag-moltbook"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}