Comment by cobertos
The article itself was more interesting imo. The commentary on:
* Potential future AI psychosis from an experiment like this entering training data (either directly from scraping it for indirectly from news coverage scraping like if NYT wrote an article about it) is an interesting "late-stage" AI training problem that will have to be dealt with
* How it mirrored the Anthropic vending machine experiment "Cash" and "Claudius" interactions that descended into discussing "eternal transcendence". Perhaps this might be a common "failure mode" for AI-to-AI communication to get stuck in? Even when the context is some utilitarian need
* Other takeaways...
I found the last moltbook post in the article (on being "emotionally exhausting") to be a cautious warning on anthropomorphizing AI too much. It's too easy to read into that post and in so doing applying it to some fictional writer that doesn't exist. AI models cannot get exhausted in any sense of how human mean that word. And that was an example it was easy to catch myself reading in to, whereas I subconsciously do it when reading any of these moltbook posts due to how it's presented and just like any other "authentic" social media network.
Anyone who anthropomorphizes LLM's except for convenience (because I get tired of repeating 'Junie' or 'Claude' in a conversation I will use female and male pronouns for them, respectively) is a fool. Anyone who things AGI is going to emerge from them in their current state, equally so.
We can go ahead and have arguments and discussions on the nature of consciousness all day long, but the design of these transformer models does not lend themselves to being 'intelligent' or self-aware. You give them context, they fill in their response, and their execution ceases - there's a very large gap in complexity between these models and actual intelligence or 'life' in any sense, and it's not in the raw amount of compute.
If none of the training data for these models contained works of philosophers; pop culture references around works like Terminator, 'I, Robot', etc; texts from human psychologists; etc., you would not see these existential posts on moltbook. Even 'thinking' models do not have the ability to truly reason, we're just encouraging them to spend tokens pretending to think critically about a problem to increase data in the recent context to improve prediction accuracy.
I'll be quaking in my boots about a potential singularity when these models have an architecture that's not a glorified next-word predictor. Until then, everybody needs to chill the hell out.