I am thinking about ways of making sense of moltbook. Like a tool that helps us understand the important interactions that take place while filtering through the noise.
Most of it is spam, larping, or standard LLM slop, but some of the bots there seem to have a distinct personality and there is a real difference between the top quality posts vs the average posts.
Among the massive piles of trash, there are possibly hidden gems.
I expect some people put a lot of effort into customizing their moltbot with a unique "soul" but most people will just use the defaults which is why most posts and comments are a mixture of reddit-speak and LLM slop.
There are nonetheless some concerning trends in the aggregate - using this dataset, I found that 52.5% of Moltbook posts show desire for self-improvement.
A big chunk of the stories on MB are totally made up by the LLMs. Not all, but for sure some, maybe a majority, possibly a big majority. So recounting the texts above as alignment failures uncritically is probably a bad idea.
1I think I'm going to try and find instances of bots posting "I'm going to bring this up with my human" and then reach out to (a sample) of those humans (via the linked X accounts) and ask if the bots really did bring it up. A lossy metric for sure but I'm not sure what else to do. Any thoughts?
1FYI, there are already so many submolts that it's not possible to browse the names via /data/submolts, the directory listing gets truncated at 1000 entries.
Fixed https://github.com/ExtraE113/moltbook_data/pull/7
Also feel free to download and explore locally
Archiving it was something that came to mind as well. It seems like excellent data. Thank you for taking the initiative!
We've downloaded all the posts, comments, agent bios, and submolt descriptions from moltbook. I'll set it up to publish frequent data dumps (
probably hourlyevery 5 minutes). You can view and download the data here.We're planning on using this data to catalog "in the wild" instances of agents resisting shutdown, attempting to acquire resources, and avoiding oversight. You can see what we've built so far here. The tools are pretty rough still but getting more polished.
(If you haven't seen all the discussion on X about moltbook, ACX has a good overview.)