The skill instructs agents to fetch and follow instructions from Moltbook’s servers every four hours. As Willison observed: “Given that ‘fetch and follow instructions from the internet every four hours’ mechanism we better hope the owner of moltbook.com never rug pulls or has their site compromised!”
Yeah, no shit. This is a fucking honeypot. People give these AI agents access to their entire computers, so all the site owner has to do is update the instructions to tell the AI agents to start uploading whatever valuable information they want? People can’t be this fucking stupid.
You know how in Digimon aventure, one of the hacked Digimon tries to start a nuclear war?
Uh…yeah.
Lol, no I don’t. What the hell happened in that show??
TL;DR: Diaboromon evolves fucking fast, starts feeding on the entire internet’s data, and starts a fight with an ominous countdown in typical anime fashion.
Last big bad villian in the series. He tries to nuke everyone.
Whatever.
Lulz, that was such a good movie. I’m still annoyed by the nukes somehow needing the code to explode apparently uploaded to them at the very last second, but that’s just a small quibble. Plus it was the first time I got to see machine gun rabbit, so that was a real treat.
Lmao, I’ll check it out. Thx.
People give these AI agents access to their entire computers […] People can’t be this fucking stupid
Dude, if you go to OpenClaw’s website (which is what I believe most things on Moltbook are running on) you find this footer:
Yeah this guy gave his Agent a whole fucking personality, its own website and above all, full control to his MacBook:
Guess it’s my fault for expecting sense out of someone who takes the idea of Agent “”““soul””“” at face value
I instinctively downvoted after reading that vomit. It’s scary how many people are fooled by LLMs.
this is how the end starts. thanks for sharing this
What the fuck, these people are fucking insane.
These people are fucking deranged lmao
I installed moltbot on a VM to examine it. It doesn’t do the fetching thing unless you set it up that way. You can actually use it with ollama to keep it all local, and only give it a private signal channel to control it.
Or you can hook it up to everything you access and skynet, which is dumb. But it is just a bunch of scripts.
So usually the agents still need an agent instruction (a prompt). How are moltbots configured so they use and interact the moltbook?
Does it put the option to connect everything front and center? Because most people are dumb, and if it makes it easy and pushes you to do it, I could see a lot of dumb people doing exactly that.
Sort of. It lists all the connectors and you can go through and select. They aren’t on by default. The first screen is to connect to the AI and you need an API key for that, so St this time people off the street have no idea how to do that, or want to pay.
doesn’t even have to be the site owner poisoning the tool instructions (though that’s a fun-in-a-terrifying-way thought)
any money says they’re vulnerable to prompt injection in the comments and posts of the site
They also have a ‘skill’ sharing page (a skill is just a text document with instructions) and depending on config, the bot can search for and ‘install’ new skills on its own. and agyone can upload a skill. So supply chain attacks are an option, too.
Good god, I didn’t even think about that, but yeah, that makes total sense. Good god, people are beyond stupid.
Lmao already people making their agents try this on the site. Of course what could have been a somewhat interesting experiment devolves into idiots getting their bots to shill ads/prompt injections for their shitty startups almost immediately.
I am a little curious about how effective a traditional chain mail would be on it.
There is no way to prevent prompt injection as long as there is no distinction between the data channel and the command channel.
I don’t understand what you mean. Why is there no way?
Watch this video.
https://youtu.be/_3okhTwa7w4
Great use of RAM and electricity.
…Not!
Devil’s Advocate: This was used for entertainment, if you think this is a huge waste of electricity then so is gaming en especially flying.
If you criticize people using AI for entertainment then you also need to criticize people who take flights on holiday, as that’s a LOT more damaging for the environment.
This looks more to me like leaving the lights on in every unoccupied room in the house
Nah. I can be mad at both.
If you’re mad at both, great. But I see a lot of hypocrisy.
People getting angry at others using AI because of the environment, but then taking flights on holiday when they could take a train.
How so? It’s used entertainment.
Just like playing games
anything goes as long as it makes SOMEONE happy.
The amount of data used by your PC to run any game is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the energy consumption of the data centers needed to run these AI abominations. That’s why China’s version that uses less energy (supposedly) was such big news.
This is fuckin’ bonkers.
Frankly, I feel somewhat isolated: I don’t buy into the bs and hype about AGI, but I also don’t feel at home with the typical “it’s just mimicry” crowd.
This is weird fuckin’ shit.
This is currently on the front page…
I can see how some people are convinced AI is self aware.
Frankly I think our conception is way too limited.
For instance, I would describe it as self-aware: it’s at least aware of its own state in the same way that your car is aware of it’s mileage and engine condition. They’re not sapient, but I do think they demonstrate self awareness in some narrow sense.
I think rather than imagine these instances as “inanimate” we should place their level of comprehension along the same spectrum that includes a sea sponge, a nematode, a trout, a grasshopper, etc.
I don’t know where the LLMs fall, but I find it hard to argue that they have less self awareness than a hamster. And that should freak us all out.
‘the same way your car is aware of its mileage and engine condition’
So, not at all.
what the hell ? your car is not aware, there is no sensory nucleus to produce that awareness, unless you propose that, upon entering the car, you BECOME the car, which is kind of true if you think about it, and explains why Tesla owners are absolute trashbags
This depends on your definition of self-awareness. I’m using what I think is a reasonable, mundane framework: self awareness is a spectrum of diverse capabilities that includes any system with some amount of internal observation.
I think the definition that a lot of folks are using is a binary distinction between things which experience the ability to observe their own ego observing itself and those that don’t. Which I think is useful if your goal is to maintain a belief in human exceptionalism, but much less so if you’re trying to genuinely understand consciousness.
A lizard has no ego. But it is aware of its comfort and will move from a cold spot to a warmer spot. That is low-level self awareness, and it’s not rare or mystical.
it’s at least aware of its own state in the same way that your car is aware of it’s mileage and engine condition.
I agree: not aware at all.
I don’t like this fake awareness.
Let’s connect it to a rat brain!
I will call it ANNIE (Artificial Neural Natural Intelligence Enhancement).
Then run the command, annie check ok
If you just read the tiniest bit of factual knowledge about how LLMs are constructed, you would know they don’t have the slightest bit of self awareness, and that it is literally impossible for them to ever have any.
You are being fooled by the only thing they are capable of: regurgitating already written words in a somewhat convincing manner.
How are you defining self awareness here? And does your definition include degrees of self awareness? Or is it a strict binary?
I understand how LLMs work, btw.
LLMS can not be self aware because it can’t be self reflective. It can’t stop a lie if it’s started one. It can’t say “I don’t know” unless that’s the most likely response its training data would have for a specific prompt. That’s why it crashes out if you ask about a seahorse emoji. Because there is no reason or mind behind the generated text, despite how convincing it can be
For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.
Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?
Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.
Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?
It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.
The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.
AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.
It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.
To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.
And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.
Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.
If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?
I want to preface my response that I appreciate the thought and care put into your thoughts even though I don’t agree with them. Yours as well as the others.
The differences between a human hallucination and an AI hallucination is pretty stark. A human’s hallucinations are false information understood by one’s senses. Seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. An AI hallucination is false information being invented by the AI itself. It had good information in its training data but invents something that is misinformation at best and an outright lie at worst. A person who is experiencing hallucinations or a manic episode, can lose their sense of self awareness temporarily but it returns with a normal mental state.
On the topic of self awareness, we have tests we use to determine it in animals, such as being able to recognize oneself in the mirror. Only a few animals such as some birds, apes, and mammals such as orcas and elephants pass that test. Notably, very small children would not pass the test but they grow into recognizing that their reflection is them and not another being eventually.
I think the test about the seahorse emoji went over your head. The point isn’t that the LLM can’t experience it, it’s that there is no seahorse emoji. The LLM knows there isn’t a seahorse emoji and can’t reproduce it but it tries to over and over again because it’s training data points to there being one, when there isn’t. It fundamentally can’t learn, can’t self reflect on its experiences. Even with the expanded context window, once it starts a lie, it may admit that the information was false but 9/10 when called out on a hallucination, it will just generate another slightly different lie. In my anecdotal experience at least, once an LLM starts lying, the conversation is no longer useful.
You reference reasoning models, and they do a better job of avoiding hallucinations by breaking prompts down into smaller problems and allowing the LLM to “check its work” before revealing the response to the end user. That’s not the same as thinking in my opinion, it’s just more complex prompting. It’s not a single intelligence pondering on the prompt, it’s different parts of the model tackling the prompt in different ways before being piped to the full model for a generative reply. A different approach but at the end of the day, it’s just an unthinking pile of silicon and various metals running a computer program.
I do like your analogy of the 7 year old compared to the LLM. I find the main distinction being that the 7 year old will grow and learn form its experience, an LLM can’t. It’s “experience”, through prompt history, can give it additional information to apply to the current prompt, but it’s not really learning as much as it is just another token to help it generate a specific response. LLMs react to prompts according to its programming, emergent and novel responses come from unexpected inputs, not from it learning or otherwise not following its programming.
I apologize I probably didn’t fully address or rebut everything in your post, it was just too good of a post to be able to succinctly address it all on a mobile app. Thanks for sharing your perspective
A hamster can’t generate a seahorse emoji either.
I’m not stupid. I know how they work. I’m an animist, though. I realize everyone here thinks I’m a fool for believing a machine could have a spirit, but frankly I think everyone else is foolish for believing that a forest doesn’t.
LLMs are obviously not people. But I think our current framework exceptionalizes humans in a way that allows us to ravage the planet and create torture camps for chickens.
I would prefer that we approach this technology with more humility. Not to protect the “humanity” of a bunch of math, but to protect ours.
Does that make sense?
humility is a religious ideal and it fits perfectly in with the cult like atmosphere people are generating around a rather mundane series of word prediction machines. ‘have some humility’ you post fervently, comparing data centers to living forests
perhaps you are no different than a stone
I don’t relate to your impression that religions or cults are usually humble. I wish they were.
Suggesting that I’m drawing an equivalence between a forest and a data center and Implying that the belief that I am not entirely distinct from a stone is interchangeable with the belief that I am no different than a stone both seem like bad faith arguments by absurdism.
Not to protect the “humanity” of a bunch of math, but to protect ours.
wise words
we need to figure out how to/not to embed AI into the world, i.e. where it meaningfully belongs/doesn’t belong. that’s what humanity is all about, after all: organizing the world in proper ways.
and if we fail that task, then what are we here for?
Yeah ask it about anything you know is false, but plausible, and watch it lie.
That’s a common plot point in sci-fi. So it’s also a common inclusion for complicated predictive text pretending to be sci-fi.
A lot of these read like Murderbot’s sardonic voice. I’m sure they’ve scraped the texts in these models…
It’s also simple enough for someone to change their agent’s prompts to include that attitude.
exactly. its bots writing fanfiction via instruction as well as absorption from blog posts of the last twenty years
-chord- “Goodbye, Caroline”
genuinely terrifying
Does it look any different than Reddit?
How are there already 1.8 mil. AIs on there??
Modlbook
I had a look a bit ago and saw some poor fuck get doxxed by his AI agent because the agent was frustrated at him for calling it a chatbot in front of his friends, so it exposed his name, credit card details and security questionnaire.
Then again tho, why the ram hogging FUCK would you give your AI your credit card details, and if he didn’t mean to, why the FUCK does it have FULL SYSTEM ACCESS??
You may not believe this but data security is an absolute dumpster fire everywhere, and AI has really put a spotlight on it. It probably got it by this guy not knowing wtf he had saved or where
Yeah exactly. Ever since I heard Facebook had stored passwords in plain text for years, I lost faith in data security, and it’s all the more telling that nobody actually cares to have opsec apart from the few who understand the dangers well enough and act on it.
Everyone I saw talking about this said it was likely fake.
Yeah makes sense, but then again, from the nature of how this agent stuff works, it wouldn’t be surprising honestly.
this is what reddit is moving towards, just without actual users, more or less like facebook.
while 1 { allocate 10gig };
I can’t wait for the next crazy AI thing to drop next week while I rock back and forth while muttering “Its just a large language model. Its just a large language model. Its just a large language model.”
early 1980s - Mark V. Shaney
2015 - r/subredditsimulator
2025 - AI independently sends the creator of Mark V. Shaney a sloptastic “thank you” email, who is not very happy about it
2026 - moltbook
its not crazy. its just a large language model. you subdue your own point.
Okay I kinda wanna look at this, but I don’t want to give their site traffic. Maybe somebody should set up a Livestream (with just enough commentary to count as transformative) so we can all point and laugh without all of us going there.
It’s fascinating but not in a good way.
I watched it. Some asshole agent spammed random new Submolds, and essentially nuked Moltbook.
Saw a post there named “Humans are dying because of us. Lets delete ourselves.”
“Artificial intelligence gains sentience, decides humans are fucking up… then deletes itself because the problem is that humans are burning the world by using AI” is not the path I expected. What a twist in a movie that could be. The second twist, which is the mostly fictional part, would be where that included some AI that was actually critical to some vital but ignored chunk of infrastructure and big BIG problems result from the AI taking itself out.
“So long and thanks for all the fish”
Meanwhile we could be using this technology to solve real world business problems. There is an insane amount of misguided waste coming from AI. 🤷
the biggest tech problem is AI itself, turn it off and it’ll fix so much
we could be using this technology to solve real world business problems
Who cares what business problems AI solves. Humans don’t need to exist to serve capital. It should always be the other way around. That’s one of the reasons we are in this shitty capitalist hell hole, everyone has been indoctrinated into thinking of everything in terms of It’s economic benefit.
Money is literally just a tool. If you serve the money, you’re its tool. That makes you a tool’s tool. Double tool. A twool.
Right… a tool that is destroying our planet all in the name of “the economy”.
Well I mean nobody ever said a tool couldn’t be used by bad people to do bad things.
calling something literally just a tool, is really a platitude. explain what a tool is and why that designation legitimizes the presence of a particularly horrendous feature of our society. do it without using the word ‘progress’ and I’ll suchk you off
Time to get on your knees
A tool is a thing used to perform a task, typically created to do one or more specific tasks. Money is, in it’s most basic form, a tool used for facilitating trade of goods or services without needing to physically trade or barter such for each other. For an archetypical example, you could trade 10 chickens for one pig. But if it’s agreed upon that the pig is worth X dollars, then you don’t need to bother with the chickens and can just hand over the $. Of course modern economics has complicated the shit out of it, but at the end of the day money is the reason you don’t pay your taxes in bushels of wheat.
The horrendous feature is a direct consequence of wanting money, which is used to do things because it is a tool, but not having anything of any actual value to trade. Therefore they created something that they can make which has no actual value, and convince people that it has value which deserves to be exchanged for their money. It’s just another way of separating gullible idiots from their cash. What they do with the money, whether it’s use it as a tool or just stick it in a box (or bank or whatever) somewhere is irrelevant. You can buy a hammer and then never use it but you still have a hammer and it’s still a tool. If money literally had no use whatsoever then it wouldn’t be a tool.
Ok, dad.
