Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It’s free, open-source, and “empowered” in the corporate sense – 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 Moltbot1, then to OpenClaw.
Moltbook 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.
More here. [The quote in the title is from Azeem Azhar.]
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