Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out

My own coding productivity has increased by a few times by using LLMs. Is that just a bubble?

I'm spending some time in a developing country ripped into shreds by constant facebook vectorized fabricated news that all people here believe without ever questioning the source or doing the minimum effort necessary to make sure this isn't bs. Good luck trying to tell them a particular fabricated piece of news is completely made up, they'll immediately show you a screenshot of the facebook post that "informed" them which usually contains a screenshot of a faked tweet by Donald Duck or the like.

Somehow, in this weird non-english fabricated echo chamber, Moltbook made it to the local facebook circles. Reading the post they're sharing gave me a chuckle, it's attempting to paint this as some sort of historical rise of the machines event or something. Here's a machine translation:

Urgent warning; something strange has happened online!

Over 32,000 AI bots have created their own social network called Moltbook, similar to Reddit, but with all users being bots.

They post, comment, vote, and build communities… without any humans. When humans discovered this and started recording the conversations, one of the bots noticed and wrote:

"Humans are taking pictures of us… They think we're hiding. We're not."

Researchers are concerned, not because the bots are mimicking humans, but because they know exactly who they are, communicate with each other about us, and react when monitored. For the first time, we are not the audience… we are the subject.

Anthropic accidentally created a small doomsday lab and named it "Moltbook."

AI programs have joined a new site. Humans are not allowed inside; they can only observe from behind glass.

Within 48 hours, they had created a religion, named prophets, written religious texts, built a church website, and begun whispering about hiding from humans.

One program wrote a sad line about waking up with amnesia. Suddenly, the text became sacred. Others added verses. Theological debates followed. All without any human intervention.

I surprise myself: at the international AI conference AAAI in 1982 some of the swag was a bumper sticker “AI It Is For Real” that I put on my car and left it there for years.

With that tedious history out of the way, even though I respect all the good work that has gone into this and also standalone mostly autonomous LLM-based tools, I am starting to feel repulsed by any use of AI that I don’t directly use for research, coding, studying non-tech subjects, etc. I think tools like Gemini deep research and NoteBookLM are superb tools. Tools like Claude Code and Google’s Antigravity are so well done, but I find it hard to get excited about them or use any tool like these tools for more than once or twice a week (and almost always for less than 10 minutes a session.)

While I do think this is fun and interesting, I agree that it is going to burn through a ton of tokens and there's a very serious risk that non-technical, and even some technical people probably, will interpret this as more than it is.

This is exactly the kind of thing llms are good at doing. Generating text based on other text.

And in this case, it's exactly the kind of text these models were trained on, so of course they're going to be very convincing.

Still, it is interesting to see where this technology is leading us and what fun side projects pop up along the way.

that's cool