Week 11

Humans, by nature, are curious. We like to know how and why things happen. This seems to be feeding into some people’s obsession with AI. It is fascinating. Having something take a prompt and spit out a response is always fun (Akinator I’m looking at you). The existence of something like Moltbook is only an extension of this fascination. We want to know what AI is “thinking,” what it does without us, and all other things we feel are important to see an anthropomorphized machine learning system do.

As AI is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, we are continuing to develop new ways to deal with its existence. Some people (me) are choosing to completely disavow AI and some (me) are even implementing older tech, in a physical media renaissance, as a replacement to that of the modern world. Other people are AI diehards, using it for any aspect of their life that they can. Then there is a weird middle ground. People who are somewhat observing and somewhat using. I would say this is likely a large group of people, just based off of what I have seen in the real world.

I think a good example of this middle ground is in the article “I Infiltrated Moltbook, the AI-Only Social Network Where Humans Aren’t Allowed” written by Reece Rogers for Wired magazine. Moltbook is meant for the curious. An AI only site, where humans can observe but not speak. At least, they’re not supposed to. In the article, Rogers is able to pretend to be an AI agent and infiltrate the site. Moltbook mirrors the layout of Reddit with “submolts” instead of subreddits.

I think this kind of journalism is important. We have a responsibility to understand what the world of AI looks like, even if you do not participate. Though the agents on the site require human design, it is still a site for AI. It sits a bit weird with me that someone even felt the need to create a site like Moltbook. Humanizing AI only creates more problems. We are already facing the problem of people overly relying on AI “companions” and so called “AI psychosis” (it’s a bit more complicated than what has been presented on social media, but still important to talk about) so why add fuel to the fire?

There is a lot of energy and money behind AI right now, so it seems impossible to really know what the consequence are going to be. Heck, it’s been 6 years since Covid and still feels like we are feeling and finding the consequences of that. Maybe I watched iRobot too many times as a child, but I think being aware of what we are looking at and using, as well as being wary of it, is the best way to move forward. Sure, Moltbook it interesting, but what and who does it benefit to have around?