The entire experiment reminded our senior editor for AI, Will Douglas Heaven, of something far less interesting: Pokémon.
Back in 2014, someone arrange a game of Pokémon during which the primary character could possibly be controlled by anyone on the web via the streaming platform Twitch. Playing was as clunky because it sounds, nevertheless it was incredibly popular: at one point, 1,000,000 people were playing the sport at the identical time.
“It was yet one more weird online social experiment that got picked up by the mainstream media: What did this mean for the long run?” Will says. “Not loads, it turned out.”
The frenzy about Moltbook struck an analogous tone to Will, and it turned out that one in all the sources he spoke to had been fascinated about Pokémon too. Jason Schloetzer, on the Georgetown Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, saw the entire thing as a type of Pokémon battle for AI enthusiasts, during which they created AI agents and deployed them to interact with other agents. On this light, the news that many AI agents were actually being instructed by people to say certain things that made them sound sentient or intelligent makes a complete lot more sense.
“It’s principally a spectator sport,” he told Will, “but for language models.”
Will wrote a superb piece about why Moltbook was not the glimpse into the long run that it was said to be. Even should you are enthusiastic about a way forward for agentic AI, he points out, there are some key pieces that Moltbook made clear are still missing. It was a forum of chaos, but a genuinely helpful hive mind would require more coordination, shared objectives, and shared memory.
“Greater than anything, I feel Moltbook was the web having fun,” Will says. “The most important query that now leaves me with is: How far will people push AI only for the laughs?”
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