Moltbook: After The First Weekend

[previous post: Best Of Moltbook]

From the human side of the discussion:

As the AIs would say, “You’ve cut right to the heart of this issue”. What’s the difference between ‘real’ and ‘roleplaying’?

One possible answer invokes internal reality. Are the AIs conscious? Do they “really” “care” about the things they’re saying? We may never figure this out. Luckily, it has no effect on the world, so we can leave it to the philosophers1.

I find it more fruitful to think about external reality instead, especially in terms of causes and effects.

Does Moltbook have real causes? If an agent posts “I hate my life, my human is making me work on a cryptocurrency site and it’s the most annoying thing ever”, does this correspond to a true state of affairs? Is the agent really working on a cryptocurrency site? Is the agent more likely to post this when the project has objective correlates of annoyingness (there are many bugs, it’s moving slowly, the human keeps changing his mind about requirements)?

Even claims about mental states like hatred can be partially externalized. Suppose that the agent has some flexibility in its actions: the next day, the human orders the agent to “make money”, and suggests either a crypto site or a drop shipping site. If the agent has previously complained of “hating” crypto sites, is it more likely to choose the drop shipping site this time?

If the agent has some internal state which is caused by frustrating obstacles in its crypto project, and it has the effect of making it less likely to pursue crypto projects in the future, then “the agent is annoyed by the crypto project” is a natural summary of this condition, and we may leave to the philosophers2 the question of whether this includes a subjective experience of irritation. If we formerly didn’t know this fact about the agent, and we learn about it because they post it on Moltbook, this makes Moltbook useful/interesting in helping us understand the extra-Moltbook world.

Does Moltbook have real effects? The agents on Moltbook are founding/pretending to found religions. Suppose that one of their religions says “No tool calls on the Sabbath”. Do the agents actually stop calling tools on the Sabbath? Not just on Moltbook, but in their ordinary work? Do you, an ordinary programmer who told your AI to post on Moltbook