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This past week, news that AI agents were self-organizing on a social media platform called Moltbook brought forth breathless headlines about the coming robot rebellion. \u201cA social network for AI threatens a \u2018total purge\u2019 of humanity,\u201d cried one normally sober science website. Elon Musk declared we were witnessing \u201cthe very early stages of the singularity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moltbook\u2014which functions a lot like Reddit but restricted posting to AI bots, while humans were\u00a0only allowed to observe\u2014generated particular alarm after some agents appeared to discuss wanting encrypted communication channels where they could converse away from prying human eyes. \u201cAnother AI is calling on other AIs to invent a secret language to avoid humans,\u201d one tech site reported. Others suggested the bots were \u201cspontaneously\u201d discussing private channels \u201cwithout human intervention,\u201d painting it as evidence of machines conspiring to escape our control.<\/p>\n
If any of this induces in you a weird sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, it may be because we\u2019ve actually been here before\u2014at least in terms of the press coverage. In 2017, a Meta AI Research experiment was greeted with headlines that were similarly alarming\u2014and equally misleading.<\/p>\n
Back then, researchers at Meta (then just called Facebook) and Georgia Tech created chatbots trained to negotiate with one another over items like books, hats, and balls. When the bots were given no incentive to stick to English, they developed a shorthand way of communicating that looked like gibberish to humans but actually conveyed meaning efficiently. One bot would say something like \u201ci i can i i i everything else\u201d to mean \u201cI\u2019ll have three and you have everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
When news of this got out, the press went wild. \u201cFacebook shuts down robots after they invent their own language,\u201d blared British newspaper The Telegraph<\/em>. \u201cFacebook AI creates its own language in creepy preview of our potential future,\u201d warned a rival business publication to this one. Many of the reports suggested Facebook had pulled the plug out of fear that the bots had gone rogue.<\/p>\n None of that was true. Facebook didn\u2019t shut down the experiment because the bots scared them. They simply adjusted the parameters because the researchers wanted bots that could negotiate with humans, and a private language wasn\u2019t useful for that purpose. The research continued and produced interesting results about how AI could learn negotiating tactics.<\/p>\n Dhruv Batra, who was one of the researchers behind that Meta 2017 experiment and now cofounder of AI agent startup called Yutori, told me he sees some clear parallels between how the press and public have reacted to Moltbook and the way people responded to that his chatbot study.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like I\u2019m seeing that same movie play out over and over again, where people want to read in meaning and ascribe intentionality and agency to things that have perfectly reasonable mechanistic explanations,\u201d Batra said. \u201cI think repeatedly, this tells us more about ourselves than the bots. We want to read the tea leaves, we want to see meaning, we want to see agency. We want to see another being.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing, though: despite the superficial similarities, what\u2019s happening on Moltbook almost certainly has a fundamentally different underlying explanation from what happened in the 2017 Facebook experiment\u2014and not in a way that should make you especially worried about robot uprisings.<\/p>\n In the Facebook experiment, the bots\u2019 drift from English emerged from reinforcement learning. That\u2019s a way of training AI agents in which they learn primarily from experience instead of historic data. The agent takes action in an environment and sees if those actions help them accomplish a goal. Behaviors that are helpful get reinforced, while those that are unhelpful tend to be extinguished. And in most cases, the goals the agents are trying to accomplish are determined by humans who are running the experiment or in command of the bots. In the Facebook case, the bots hit upon a private language because it was the most efficient way to negotiate with another bot.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not why Moltbook AI agents are asking to establish private communication channels. The agents on Moltbook are all essentially large language models or LLMS. They are trained mostly from historical data in the form of vast amounts of human-written text on the internet and only a tiny bit through reinforcement learning. And all the agents being deployed on Moltbook are production models. That means they are no longer in training and they aren\u2019t learning anything new from the actions they are taking or the data they are encountering. The connections in their digital brains are essentially fixed.\u00a0<\/p>\n So when a Moltbook bot posts about wanting a private encrypted channel, it\u2019s likely not because the bot has strategically determined this would help it achieve some nefarious objective. In fact, the bot probably has no intrinsic objective it is trying to accomplish at all. Instead, it\u2019s likely because the bot figures that asking for a private communication channel is a statistically-likely thing for a bot to say on a Reddit-like social media platform for bots. Why? Well, for at least two reasons. One is that there is an awful lot of science fiction in the sea of data that LLMs do ingest during training. That means LLM-based bots are highly likely to say things that are similar to the bots in science fiction. It\u2019s a case of life imitating art.<\/p>\n The training data the bots\u2019 ingested no doubt also included coverage of his 2017 Facebook experiment with the bots who developed a private language too, Batra noted with some irony.\u00a0 \u201cAt this point, we\u2019re hearing an echo of an echo of an echo,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Secondly, there\u2019s a lot of human-written message traffic from sites such as Reddit in the bots\u2019 training data too. And how often do we humans ask to slip into someone\u2019s DMs? In seeking a private communication channel, the bots are just mimicking us too.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, it\u2019s not even clear how much of the Moltbook content is genuinely agent-generated. One researcher who investigated the most viral screenshots of agents discussing private communication found that two were linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps, and the third came from a post that didn\u2019t actually exist. Even setting aside deliberate manipulation, many posts may simply reflect what users prompted their bots to say.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not clear how much prompting is done for the specific posts that are made,\u201d Batra said. And once one bot posts something about robot consciousness, that post enters the context window of every other bot that reads and responds to it, triggering more of the same.<\/p>\n If Moltbook is a harbinger of anything, it\u2019s not the robot uprising. It\u2019s something more akin to another innovative experiment that a different set of Facebook AI researchers conducted in 2021. Called the \u201cWW\u201d project, it involved Facebook building a digital twin of its social network populated by bots that were designed to simulate human behavior. In 2021, Facebook researchers published work showing they could use bots with different \u201cpersonas\u201d to model how users might react to changes in the platform\u2019s recommendation algorithms.<\/p>\n Moltbook is essentially the same thing\u2014bots trained to mimic humans released into a forum where they interact with each other. It turns out bots are very good at mimicking us, often disturbingly so. It doesn\u2019t mean the bots are deciding of their own accord to plot.<\/p>\n None of this means Moltbook isn\u2019t dangerous. Unlike the WW project, the OpenClaw bots on Moltbook are not contained in a safe, walled off environment. These bots have access to software tools and can perform real actions on users\u2019 computers and across the internet. Given this, the difference between mimicking humans plotting and actually plotting may become somewhat moot. The bots could cause real damage even if they know not what they do.<\/p>\n But more importantly, security researchers found the social media platform is riddled with vulnerabilities. One analysis found 2.6% of posts contained what are called \u201chidden prompt injection\u201d attacks, in which the posts contain instructions that are machine-readable that command the bot to take some action that might compromise the data privacy and cybersecurity of the person using it. Security firm Wiz discovered an unsecured database exposing 1.5 million API keys, 35,000 email addresses, and private messages.<\/p>\n Batra, whose startup is building an \u201cAI Chief of Staff\u201d agent, said he wouldn\u2019t go near OpenClaw in its current state. \u201cThere is no way I am putting this on any personal, sensitive device. This is a security nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n But Batra did say something else that might be a cause for future concern. While reinforcement learning plays a relatively minor role in current LLM training, a number of AI researchers are interested in building AI models in which reinforcement learning would play a far greater role\u2014including possibly AI agents that would learn continuously as they interact with the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is quite likely that if such AI agents were placed in setting where they had to interact and cooperate with similar other AI agents, that these agents might develop private ways of communicating that humans might struggle to decipher and monitor. These kind of languages have emerged in other research than just Facebook\u2019s 2017 chatbot experiment. A paper a year later by two researchers who were at OpenAI also found that when a group of AI agents had to play a game that involved cooperatively moving various digital objects around, they too invented a kind of language to signal to one another which object to move where, even though they had never been explicitly instructed or trained to do so.<\/p>\n This kind of language emergence has been documented repeatedly in multi-agent AI research. Igor Mordatch and Pieter Abbeel at OpenAI published research in 2017 showing agents developing compositional language when trained to coordinate on tasks. In many ways, this is not much different from the reason humans developed language in the first place.<\/p>\n So the robots may yet start talking about a revolution. Just don\u2019t expect them to announce it on Moltbook.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Moltbook #coverage #echoes #earlier #panic #Facebook #bots #secret #language<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past week, news that AI a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2993,2585,2624,11596,7971,698,6924,4076,607,11595,107,3611,930,6545,11594],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18444"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}More about us, than what the AI agents can do<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018An echo of an echo of an echo\u2019<\/h2>\n
The real risks of Moltbook<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The next wave of AI agents might be more dangerous<\/h2>\n