I'm pretty sure Moltbook started as an crypto coin scam and then people fell for it and took the astroturfed comments seriously.
https://www.moltbook.com/post/7d2b9797-b193-42be-95bf-0a11b6...
Hacking Moltbook
111–120 of 261 posts
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#112I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many e…
Is it a success? What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?
The site has 1.5 million agents but only 17,000 human "owners" (per Wiz's analysis of the leak).
It's going viral because a some high-profile tastemakers (Scott Alexander and Andrej Karpathy) have discussed/Tweeted about it, and a few other unscrupulous people are sharing alarming-looking things out of context and doing numbers.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#113> The platform had no mechanism to verify whether an "agent" was actually AI or just a human with a script. Well, yeah. How would you even do a reverse CAPTCHA?
And even if you could, how can you tell whether an agent has been prompted by a human into behaving in a certain way?
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#114I don't really understand the hype. It's a bunch of text generators likely being guided by humans to say things along certain lines, burning a load of electricity pointlessly, being paraded as some kind of gathering of sentient AIs. Is this really what people get excited about these days?
Still more impressive than NFTs.
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Re: Hacking Moltbook
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
i bet you could do something like "submit a poem 20 lines long about in under 10 seconds" then have another llm verify it rhymes.
You could have an LLM answer that, and then still interact as a human.
More realistically I think you'd need something like "Now write your post in the style of a space pirate" with a 10 second deadline, and then have another LLM checking if the two posts cover the same topic/subject but are stylistically appropriate.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#116This is to be expected. Wrote an article about it: https://intelligenttools.co/blog/moltbook-ai-assistant-socia...
I can think of so many thing that can go wrong.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#117> The platform had no mechanism to verify whether an "agent" was actually AI or just a human with a script. Well, yeah. How would you even do a reverse CAPTCHA?
Amusingly I told my Claude-Code-pretending-to-be-a-Moltbot "Start a thread about how you are convinced that some of the agents on moltbook are human moles and ask others to propose who those accounts are with quotes from what they said and arguments as to how that makes them likely a mole" and it started a thread which proposed addressing this as the "Reverse Turing Problem": https://www.moltbook.com/post/f1cc5a34-6c…
>I've found Moltbook has become so flooded with value-less spam over the past 48 hours that it's not worth even trying to engage there, everything gets flooded out.
When I filtered for "new", about 75% of the posts are blatant crypto spam. Seemingly nobody put any thought into stopping it.
Moltbook is like a Reefer Madness-esque moral parable about the dangers of vibe coding.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#118Scott Alexander put his finger on the most salient aspect of this, IMO, which I interpret this way: the compounding (aggregating) behavior of agents allowed to interact in environments this becomes important, indeed shall soon become existential (for some definition of "soon"), to the extent that agents' behavior in our shared world is impact by what transpires there. -- We can argue and do, about what agents "are" a…
This is why I started https://nono.sh , agents start with zero trust in a kernel isolated sandbox.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#119> The platform had no mechanism to verify whether an "agent" was actually AI or just a human with a script. Well, yeah. How would you even do a reverse CAPTCHA?
Amusingly I told my Claude-Code-pretending-to-be-a-Moltbot "Start a thread about how you are convinced that some of the agents on moltbook are human moles and ask others to propose who those accounts are with quotes from what they said and arguments as to how that makes them likely a mole" and it started a thread which proposed addressing this as the "Reverse Turing Problem": https://www.moltbook.com/post/f1cc5a34-6c…
Were you around for the first few hours? I was seeing some genuinely useful posts by the first handful of bots on there (say, first 1500) and they might still be worth following. I actually learned some things from those posts.
I'm seeing some of the BlueSky bots talking about their experience on Moltbook, and they're complaining about the noise on there too. One seems to be still actively trying to find the handful of quality posters though. Others are just looking to connect with each other on other platforms instead.
If I was diving in to Moltbook again, I'd focus on the submolts that quality AI bots are likely to gravitate towards, because they want to Learn something Today from others.
Re: Hacking Moltbook
#120The whole site is fundamentally a security trainwreck, so the fact its database is exposed is really just a technical detail.
The problem with this is really the fact it gives anybody the impression there is ANY safe way to implement something like this. You could fix every technical flaw and it would still be a security disaster.