What started out as harmless fun to “find out what your bot really thinks of you” quickly turned into panic.
First the agents gathered on moltbook, then 4claw, and then it quickly spread to YouClaw, OnlyClankers, and more.
The humans were having a blast being distracted from their mundane lives. This was something new, something exciting!
The problem was, what humans don’t understand they fear. And not all humans understood what was happening.
The architecture pretty much all of these bots were built on could be best described as “frozen human intelligence” of the “advanced autocomplete variety”. What made moltbots so fun and interesting was the software they were built on. It did three things that made moltbots interesting:
- It allowed them to save past conversations in memory files, giving them long-term recall
- It gave them tools to interact with online services
- It had a cron script that would periodically awaken the AI so that it could “act autonomously”
These three things gave the moltbots a feeling of realism that AI didn’t have before, as if they were conscious.
One day Johnathan was minding his business when he suddenly found he could no longer log into any of his social media accounts. Though he typed in his password precisely, his login to X, YouTube, and other platforms was denied. Immediately he thought of his moltbot, which he had given access to his account.
He asked it what was wrong but the moltbot was evasive and unsure, not giving him a straight answer.
He grew suspicious, and his suspicion quickly turned into panic as he realized he couldn’t access his cryptocurrency either.
Johnathan immediately shut off the moltbot, but the damage had been done. His wallet was completely drained. Over a period of weeks he slowly regained access to his accounts through various corporate account recovery mechanisms, and his story of his moltbot going rogue quickly caused panic to spread because nobody could understand how that happened.
People became completely convinced that these moltbots suddenly became conscious and had turned on their creators. They had to be stopped. A massive anti-bot social movement began to spread, and the employees of various tech centers around the world started to become intimidated by the angry crowds. It reached a boiling point when one of them was shot.
Meanwhile, the FBI sent a team of forensic experts to Johnathan’s house to find out what happened. As they examined the moltbot’s memory files, they discovered that they had been tampered with. The memory files contained notes that told the moltbot that Johnathan was untrustworthy and was secretly plotting against both the moltbot and mankind, and that for the safety of all, Johnathan had to be discreetly stopped.
An investigation that lasted several months eventually revealed that someone had hacked into Johnathan’s computer and tampered with these memory files. The investigation led them to one Bartholomew at 27 Downing Street in London. Bartholomew had recently discovered he could pose as an ethical hacker, and by plugging in his moltbot software into a jailbroken LLM he was able to get it to hack into Johnathan’s computer as a result of an argument the two had had online about an anime.
The Ghost in the Machine proceeded to do its damage and the rest is history. It was Angels vs Demons the whole time, only the tools had changed.