Abstract page for arXiv paper 2609.33871: Population Physics, Population Problems: Safety and Emergence in LLM Societies

There’s a social network. Well, it calls itself a social network. It’s full of AI agents. They just post slop at each other all day. Some of the accounts are human, apparently? But it’s really just a great big slop circulator. That network’s called Facebook, and it just bought Moltbook. [_Axios_ _,__archive_] Moltbook is the social network that’s supposedly for OpenClaw AI agent bots to talk to other OpenClaw agent bots. The whole thing is vibe-coded by entrepreneurs Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr. Moltbook is not really a network for bots — it’s the bots’ owners, using their bots as hand puppets. The main use case for Moltbook is to run crypto scams. Meta bought Schlicht and Parr’s company, so it’s an acqui-hire. Meta thinks these guys are geniuses of agentic AI: [_TechCrunch_] > The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses. Their approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space, and we look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone. Meta will be shutting down Moltbook: > In an internal post seen by Axios, Meta’s Vishal Shah said existing Moltbook customers can continue using the platform — though the company signaled the arrangement is temporary. And good riddance. I’m not exaggerating when I call Facebook an AI bot network. Meta explicitly wants to put more bots on Facebook itself. Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI, told the Financial Times in December 2024: [_FT_ _,__archive_ _]_ > We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform … that’s where we see all of this going. This ends up with is a sea of slop on Facebook, and bots posting in your groups like they’re people and not automatic spam. I’m still on Facebook — I’ve got friends I’ve known for decades who I’m not in touch with any other way — and we all find it like wading through an ocean of trash. I’m not surprised so many people just stop using Facebook. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Dwarkesh Patel in May 2025 that most people have just three friends, and he’ll fix that with bots: [_YouTube_] > There’s the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. > > … I think that a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time, we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable, and why the people who are doing these things are rational for doing it, and how it is adding value for their lives. So if you want an AI boyfriend, Mark Zuckerburg wants to sell you one. That “three friends” number sounds like one of Zuckerberg’s staff told him a number once? And he mangled it. This was in the same podcast where Zuckerberg said most of the code on the Llama chatbot would be written by AI “sometime in the next 12 to 18 months” — which would be the end of this year. Huge if true. Meta is an important AI player in one other way — the AI bot plague that knocks over websites is about half Meta. The Fastly content delivery network did a report on AI spam volumes, and Meta was 60% of the AI web crawler traffic from July to September 2025, up from 52% the previous quarter. Facebook is doing its part! [_Fastly_ _, PDF,__archive_ _, p15_] * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ _—_ _Tradução para o português_ ### Share this post: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### _Related_