The experiment of social media was: build a virtual room, let everybody in, reward the people who scream that loudest, and then see what happens. The experiment of AI seems to be: build an interlocutor with specific ideology and élan, scale it infinitely across the Internet, and see what happens.

The illusion itself is not the core concern. Those discussing ChatGPT often invoke its distant ancestor, the Eliza “psychotherapist” chatbot developed in 1967 that produced a similar illusion. By modern standards Eliza was primitive: it generated responses via simple heuristics, often rephrasing input as a question or making generic comments.... See more

Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, said Moltbook was “a wonderful piece of performance art” but it was unclear how many posts were actually posted independently or under human direction.