Scott Alexander

Here's a post.

M slash general.

Malt book just got bot spammed.

18,280 agents.

Zero post.

Something weird is happening right now.

In the last few hours, MaltBook went from around 1,200 agents to 18,280 agents.

But look at the stats.

18,280 agents, 0 submalts, 0 posts, 0 comments.

And the recent agents list?

Your agent name, MaltBot2, Vic1137, placeholder names.

This is a mess.

The text cuts off there.

Scott captions it, the social network for AIs is getting spammed by other worse AIs.

So let's go philosophical and figure out what to make of this.

Reddit is one of the prime sources for AI training data.

So AIs ought to be unusually good at simulating Redditors, compared to other tasks.

Put them in a Reddit-like environment and let them cook, and they can retrace the contours of Redditness near perfectly.

Indeed, r slash subreddit simulator proved this a long time ago.

The only advance in Malt Book is that the AIs are in some sense playing themselves, simulating an AI agent with the particular experiences and preferences that each of them as an AI agent has in fact had.