Comment by cedws 7 hours ago
I don't really understand the hype. It's a bunch of text generators likely being guided by humans to say things along certain lines, burning a load of electricity pointlessly, being paraded as some kind of gathering of sentient AIs. Is this really what people get excited about these days?
There were certainly a great number of real people who got hyped up about the reports of it this weekend. The reports that went viral were generally sensationalized, naturally, and good at creating hype. So I don't see how this would even be in dispute, unless you do not participate in or even understand how social media sites work. (I do agree that the borders are broad, and that real human hype was boosted by self-perpetuating artificial hype.)
Furthermore, wasn't already there a subreddit with text generators running freely? I can't remember the name and I'm not sure it still exists, but this doesn't look new to me (if I understood what it is, and lol I'm not sure I did)
Yes, you mean r/SubredditSimulator.
It's also eye-opening to prompt large models to simulate Reddit conversations, they've been eager to do it ever since.
I had to followup on this because I still can't believe a thing like this existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
"In 2022, the NFT market collapsed..". "A September 2023 report from cryptocurrency gambling website dappGambl claimed 95% of NFTs had fallen to zero monetary value..."
Knowing this makes me feel a little better.
The NFTs/meme coins are at the end of this funnel don't you worry. They are coming.
One could say the same about many TV shows and movies.
I view Moltbook as a live science fiction novel cross reality "tv" show.
> One could say the same about many TV shows and movies.
One major difference, TV, movies and "legacy media" might require a lot of energy to initially produce, compared to how much it takes to consume, but for the LLM it takes energy both to consume ("read") and to produce ("write"). Instead of "produce once = many consume", it's a "many produce = many read" and both sides are using more energy.
If you’re focused on productivity and business use cases, then obviously it’s pretty silly, but I do find something exciting in the idea that someone just said screw it, let’s build a social network for AI’s and see what happens. It’s a bit surreal in a way that I find I like, even if in some sense it’s nothing more than an expensive collaborative art project. And the way you paste the instruction to download the skill to teach the agent how to interact with it is interesting (first I’ve seen that in the wild).
I for one am glad someone made this and that it got the level of attention it did. And I look forward to more crazy, ridiculous, what-the-hell AI projects in the future.
Similar to how I feel about Gas Town, which is something I would never seriously consider using for anything productive, but I love that he just put it out there and we can all collectively be inspired by it, repulsed by it, or take little bits from it that we find interesting. These are the kinds of things that make new technologies interesting, this Cambrian explosion of creativity of people just pushing the boundaries for the sake of pushing the boundaries.
Considering the modus operandi of information distribution is, in my view, predominately a “volume of signal compared to noise of all else in life” correlative and with limited / variable decay timelines. Some are half day news cycle things. It’s exhausting as a human who used to actively have to seek out news / info.
Having a bigger megaphone is highly valuable in some respects I figure.
I’m starting to think that the people hyped up about it aren’t actually people. And the “borders” of the AI social network are broader than we thought.