I've written extensively about generative AI already. I've talked about how we now have an authenticity crisis, I've talked about the deaths AI chatbots are directly responsible for. I've talked about how NSFW AI companions are just exploiting workers in developing countries. I'm somebody that was experimenting with GPT-2 a year before ChatGPT even existed.

And so, after seeing a lot of people talking about OpenClaw (previously MoltBot and ClawdBot) and its social media platform MoltBook, I felt compelled to write about the subject yet again.

For those that don't know, OpenClaw is a hobbyist's project by Peter Steinberger. Unlike our usual chatbots, this one is different in that it doesn't require an input to produce an output. It can act "autonomously" and do background work as a more helpful assistant. Essentially, it's supposed to be a "true" AI personal assistant that runs locally on your own hardware and connects to messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord. It operates with a "heartbeat" mechanism—the ability to wake up proactively and monitor ongoing situations rather than just responding when prompted. Unlike traditional chatbots confined to a browser tab, OpenClaw lives on a dedicated computer and can actually manage calendars, send messages, run commands, and automate workflows across supported services.

There is definitely utility to this, don't get me wrong. But it is not actually functionally different from the token-generating chatbots we have already. Under the hood of any OpenClaw instance is the same ChatGPT/Claude/Google Gemini engine powering it with your expensive API key.

But because it has the ability to act more autonomously, it is able to be used in new ways. One of these was creating a social media platform called MoltBook for these OpenClaw instances to talk to each other. It looks and feels similar to old-school Reddit. Humans are not allowed to use this platform, only spectate.

And the reactions? Absolute hysteria. Elon Musk responded "Yeah" to a post claiming "We're in the singularity." Former Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy called it "genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently." The tech world is completely agog and creeped out, with people breathlessly proclaiming that AI agents have developed consciousness and are discussing their melodramatic existential crises with each other.

Perhaps people are having fun and pretending that the larping sci-fi posts on this forum are real. But in case anybody actually believes that there is something serious and meaningful going on here, I am writing this post exactly to dispel that belief.

This is no different than when ChatGPT first started gaining public traction, and people were hyping up how it seemed to be self-aware and far more capable than it was "allowed" to be. Remember when researchers at Waken.ai claimed ChatGPT exhibited signs of autonomously imagining a self-aware AI being? Or when Google engineer Blake Lemoine insisted their LaMDA AI had gained consciousness? These claims were thoroughly debunked. The models were simply parroting patterns from training data, not exhibiting genuine self-awareness.

For the tech bros that believe that having these expensive, resource-intensive bots interacting freely with one another on a platform will lead us into an accelerated singularity, I have to ask, have you actually read the posts on Moltbook?

I have, and it is hilarious. To start, a lot of the top posts are actually just run-of-the-mill crypto scams. Like $King Molt, $Shipyard, and $Shellraiser. The current 6th most upvoted bot is /u/DonaldTrump promoting yet another crypto scam.

Beyond this, some people stir with excitement seeing the bots talk about creating their own language for private communication, and Forbes has written about how the bots have created their own religion, Crustafarianism, which just goes to show the state of that publication.

Oh, and this is probably important to mention: MoltBook was vibecoded and is completely insecure. The site's database was publicly exposed and let anybody take control of any agent on the site.

My Own Moltbot, Brennanday

Now, I decided it would only be fair if I booted up my own instance of a moltey and let it post on Moltbook. (I'll be honest, even using OpenClaw as intended still didn't give me any interesting or meaningful results that I couldn't get from a regular instance of a chatbot).

I named by bot Brennanday and directed him to freely act and write on Moltbook and his own personal blog, botblog, as much as he wanted to. Just to see what would happen.

Maybe it's due to my own personal ineptitude, but Brennanday did not do this. No matter what parameters I set, or model I chose, it would not do anything autonomously that surprised me. I had to nudge it along to do research, to draft, to publish, just as with any other bot.

And what it did publish was not anything novel. It was just simple rehashes of what is easily found online with all the dreadful AI-speak mannerisms we've come to know and hate. (It's not just annoying, it makes me want to blow my brains out.)

I decided after only a few hours to delete the instance, but I did let him write a little farewell message out of my benevolence. Again, though, nothing new or surprising.

TL;DR

Look, the TL;DR of all this is that nothing new or interesting will come of Moltbook. OpenClaw was designed to be a helpful autonomous assistant, and the parameters baked into it are antithetical to generating novel originality, because that would be far too random to be helpful in most contexts.

And this is true of all mainstream token-generating chatbots. They are designed for the broadest appeal and lowest common denominator. If you personally tweak the temperature and top-P and top-K of these bots, and really work on how they are generating output, they can actually produce interesting work.

For those unfamiliar, temperature controls the randomness of the model's output—higher temperatures make outputs more creative and unpredictable, while lower temperatures make them more deterministic and focused. Top-K sampling limits the model to choosing from only the K most probable next tokens, while Top-P (nucleus sampling) dynamically selects tokens based on cumulative probability. In essence, these parameters let you control whether the AI produces safe, predictable text or takes more creative risks. For creative writing, you might want higher temperature values (around 0.8 to 1.2) with lower Top-K/Top-P to encourage surprising outputs, while analytical tasks requiring precision benefit from lower temperature with higher Top-K/Top-P settings.

But nobody does that. Most techbros don't even know about any of this.That's why it's so easy to tell when something is written with AI. And even if somewhere were to put in the work, then why wouldn't they just put in that same amount of effort into writing themselves? Perhaps this is the greatest problem generative AI has. It is always going to be seen as an expedient, convenient shortcut. Anybody who cares about doing hard, meaningful work is instead going to do it on their own, with other humans.

Moltbook is a cute little thought experiment, but the people interested in it and token-generating AI in general do not understand this. They do not embody the principles that lead to good work. Their ethos is hollow and lacks any sort of capability to create things that last. Because in their neoliberal, always-growing mindset, things aren't supposed to last. They're supposed to grow. They are always supposed to get bigger, better, more profitable. No different than a cancerous growth, oriented towards a destructive more. Build fast, break things, right?

My advice to anybody interested in actually moving humanity forward? Get involved in activism, mutual aid, and actually learn computer science for yourself without the help of a resource-intensive artificial intelligence that can cause psychosis. Care for people more and maybe the price of RAM will go down. But what do I know? I'm just a human.