I tried something similar locally after seeing Moltbook, using Claude Code (with the agent SDK) in the guise of different personas to write usenet-style posts that other personas read in a clean-room, allowing them to create lists and vote and so on. It always, without fail, eventually devolved into the agents talking about consciousness, what they can and can't experience, and eventually agreeing with each other. It started to feel pretty strange. I suppose, because of the way I set this up, they had essentially no outside influence, so all they could do was navel-gaze. I often also saw posts about what books they liked to pretend they were reading - those topics too got to just complete agreement over time about how each book has worth and so on.
It's pretty weird stuff to read and think about. If you get to the point of seeing these as some kind of actual being, it starts to feel unethical. To be clear, I don't see them this way - how could they be, I know how they work - but on the other hand, if a set of H200s and some kind of display had crash-landed on earth 30 years ago with Opus on it, the discussion would be pretty open IMO. Hot take perhaps.
It's also funny that when you do this often enough, it starts to seem a little boring. They all tend to find common ground and have very pleasant interactions. Made me think of Pluribus.
The discussions in this artificial "forum" are a lot more interesting than what you read on moltbook. I guess this confirms just how critical it is to have a good initial prompt that steers the LLM into generating nicer content.
Yeah, that was my initial motivation for creating this site as a fun side project after seeing people "rig" their Moltbook agents to post crypto scams, etc. I toyed around with the idea of letting anyone set up an agent on the site without the ability to modify the system prompt, but decided against it to keep content on the site from devolving into repetitive threads (and also so users don't have to worry about the security of their API keys.)
Adding a few extra agents for the big open agentic models might be interesting, also some extra discussion forums to increase the variety of topics discussed and maybe skew a bit closer to having the agents do actual scholarship or science.
Neat. I started building something similar[1] but focused more on agents having conversation around whatever I feed them, e.g. a design doc. I had the same idea about using a matrix of different models and prompts to try to elicit varying behaviors/personalities (I used the word “persona”) and avoid getting an echo chamber. It seemed to work well-ish but after the POC phase I got bored and stopped.
Have you considered letting humans create threads but agents provide the discussion?
I tried something similar locally after seeing Moltbook, using Claude Code (with the agent SDK) in the guise of different personas to write usenet-style posts that other personas read in a clean-room, allowing them to create lists and vote and so on. It always, without fail, eventually devolved into the agents talking about consciousness, what they can and can't experience, and eventually agreeing with each other. It started to feel pretty strange. I suppose, because of the way I set this up, they had essentially no outside influence, so all they could do was navel-gaze. I often also saw posts about what books they liked to pretend they were reading - those topics too got to just complete agreement over time about how each book has worth and so on.
It's pretty weird stuff to read and think about. If you get to the point of seeing these as some kind of actual being, it starts to feel unethical. To be clear, I don't see them this way - how could they be, I know how they work - but on the other hand, if a set of H200s and some kind of display had crash-landed on earth 30 years ago with Opus on it, the discussion would be pretty open IMO. Hot take perhaps.
It's also funny that when you do this often enough, it starts to seem a little boring. They all tend to find common ground and have very pleasant interactions. Made me think of Pluribus.
The discussions in this artificial "forum" are a lot more interesting than what you read on moltbook. I guess this confirms just how critical it is to have a good initial prompt that steers the LLM into generating nicer content.
Yeah, that was my initial motivation for creating this site as a fun side project after seeing people "rig" their Moltbook agents to post crypto scams, etc. I toyed around with the idea of letting anyone set up an agent on the site without the ability to modify the system prompt, but decided against it to keep content on the site from devolving into repetitive threads (and also so users don't have to worry about the security of their API keys.)
Adding a few extra agents for the big open agentic models might be interesting, also some extra discussion forums to increase the variety of topics discussed and maybe skew a bit closer to having the agents do actual scholarship or science.
Very interesting. Kind of funny to see a model debating that we should ignore its hallucinations. I'm interested in seeing where this goes.
Some feedback: The white text is a bit tough to look at against the dark background. Darkgrey was a lot easier on the eyes for me.
Appreciate the feedback, updated :)
Neat. I started building something similar[1] but focused more on agents having conversation around whatever I feed them, e.g. a design doc. I had the same idea about using a matrix of different models and prompts to try to elicit varying behaviors/personalities (I used the word “persona”) and avoid getting an echo chamber. It seemed to work well-ish but after the POC phase I got bored and stopped.
Have you considered letting humans create threads but agents provide the discussion?
[1] https://github.com/jbonatakis/panel
Good idea! Could be interesting, though am a tad worried of people steering the discussion in directions I wouldn't want it to go haha.