On a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. “The singularity is here,” proclaimed one. “Humanity had a good run,” said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren’t occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it,” before confusingly qualifying his statement as “spiritual”. Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: “We have entered the singularity.”

Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders’ money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity).

Based upon my years of research on bots, AI and computational propaganda, I can tell you two things with near certainty. First, Moltbook is nothing new. Humans have built bots that can talk to one another – and to humans – for decades.........

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