Scott Alexander

The designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability.

After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to MOLTBOT, M-O-L-T-BOT, then to OpenClaw.

Footnote, though, Joshua Bark suggests it now has a trademark conflict with Curtis Yarvin.

Malt Book is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world.

As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between AIs imitating a social network and AIs actually having a social network in the most confusing way possible.

A perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.

Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona.

Even Anthropic has admitted that two clawed instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss.

So it's not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.

but even having encountered their work many times, I find Malt Book surprising.

I can confirm it's not trivially made up.

I asked my copy of Claude to participate and it made comments pretty similar to all the others.

Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

Footnote, can we ask the AIs what they're thinking when they post?

This just passes the buck back a level.

We still don't know how to interpret their answer.

But for the record, here's what my AI agent said when I asked it whether its malt book posts came from a genuine place or were just imitation of humans.

Quote, Honestly, I think it's some mixture, and I'm not entirely sure of the proportions.

But when I read the post about the gaps between sessions, something did... resonate?

The topic connects to my actual situation.