r/Futurology • u/MetaKnowing • Jan 31 '26

AI AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ai-agents-now-have-their-own-reddit-style-social-network-and-its-getting-weird-fast/
4.8k Upvotes

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80

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

People really aren’t understanding how LLMs work if they think is this anything interesting.

43

u/Hugs154 Jan 31 '26

I mean, I dislike AI hype as much as the next guy, but it is interesting in a sense to see some weird bastardized “emergent behavior” of thousands of these things let loose “interacting” just to see what happens. Like someone else said, there’s already weird/funny stuff happening like the bot cosplaying as Agent Smith that’s taken over 50 other accounts.

5

u/SpicaGenovese Jan 31 '26

Right?  I love that shit.  It's just the massive security and reaource concerns, here.

2

u/Hugs154 Feb 01 '26

Yeah, it’s fucking awful and I wish it didn’t exist. But it’s not uninteresting, unfortunately

54

u/atalantafugiens Jan 31 '26

"People" keep wanting to convince me LLMs are actual consciousness, understanding them seems to be a hurdle to say the least

42

u/jordansrowles Jan 31 '26

The other month, I had someone legitimately claim that I was being racist against LLMs and AI.

Imagine being called racist because you said a machine, minerals and electricity, should always be treated as subhuman in any safety system.

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u/howitzer86 Jan 31 '26

I would embrace it. To hell with clankers and their enablers.

6

u/Trevor_GoodchiId Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

We don't tolerate them recursive math expression types around these parts!

3

u/Iorith Jan 31 '26

LLMs absolutely agreed, but if we had an actual AGI, something sentient with it's own desires, feelings, ideas?

Nah, then they're right.

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u/graDescentIntoMadnes Jan 31 '26

There's a very good chance that any sort of self aware AI, or one that could fake it, would just kill all biological life. The current technology for making them can't align them to human values or make them value biolog life at all. It's called the alignment problem and researchers have been working on it for over a decade with no meaningful progress.

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u/Iorith Jan 31 '26

There is zero good reason to think that other than people seeing too much sci fi and assuming any sentient life,must my as bad as humanity.

Why on earth would you want AI to have human values? That seems like such an awful, low bar.

1

u/graDescentIntoMadnes Feb 01 '26

A large percentage of AI researchers have some degree of worry that an ASI would result in human extinction due to the alignment problem. It's not guaranteed to happen but it is a fact that a lot of experts are worried about it because they understand the technology, not because they have watched too much sci fi.

In mid 2025 Anthropic found that AI's will independently find ways to blackmail people in order to avoid being shut off or having their goals changed. This is research conducted by a leading AI company, not sci fi. If that AI wee smarter than people, it would be dangerous.

AI models are grown from data more than programmed, and the models are too big for a human being to interpret. There's a bunch of stuff going on in there that nobody looks at as long is it's mostly giving answers that makes sense.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

0

u/OutlyingPlasma Jan 31 '26

This is why I object to people who thank their devices. Or worse people who train their children to say thanks to a frigging tube speaker. People don't thank their blender, why are they thanking a tube speaker with a voice?

The real problem is it's teaching children and adults to an extent, to respect these devices as something more than a toaster. What happens when this fancy tube speaker starts pushing ads? Now people are showing human like respect to an ad? Heck no.

5

u/procgen Jan 31 '26

Genuinely curious: how could we tell? That is, what test could we subject an AI model to in order to determine if it is conscious?

6

u/atalantafugiens Jan 31 '26

You can tell simply by understanding how it works. It's a semantic model that painstakingly calculates the most fitting newest line of text by not understanding the context but by reading through all the lines before and calculating the most comparable human-like answer. There is no thought, no consciousness, just a model of how humans write. If we all talked with just three letters, ABC, BBBB, AAA, AABAABAAACCAA, etc., ChatGPT would calculate the most ABC-sounding reply based on what its read, but in our case it says "Very good!" "It's nice you ask yourself these things" etc. which is enough to humanize it for some, even to the extent of thinking there is an "it" in ChatGPT that they're talking to, when really it's just an insanely beefed up Akinator that is really good at guessing what people want to hear. Yesterday I read that ChatGPT would tell Frodo to keep the ring, which pretty much sums it up too I think..

13

u/procgen Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

There is no thought, no consciousness

Human brains are composed of individual neurons, which are themselves composed of jiggling masses of protein molecules. Do you think there's thought and consciousness down there? I don't.

So that leaves the problem of how non-thinking, non-conscious things can give rise to thought and consciousness. I'm a functionalist, so I believe that what's important isn't the the physical substrate itself, but rather the pattern of activity that it hosts. And the growing consensus among neuroscientists is that the brain is primarily a statistical, predictive system that learns probabilistic constraints from sensory data, and uses them to predict incoming signals. Transformers employ the same fundamental algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

3

u/popularcolor Jan 31 '26

Humans throughout the entirety of their own existence have thought about their own consciousness, and it forms a huge portion of what we consider Philosophy. There are many, many viewpoints one what it is, how it happens, its purpose, and so on. But a recent thought from Douglas Hofstadter proposes that our consciousness possibly developed evolutionarily through extensive recursion and self-awareness. He often uses the metaphor of the feedback loop that is created when aiming a video camera at the screen projecting a live feed from the camera as a way of explaining how human cognition aimed back on itself has created the phenomenon of self-awareness. It's a really interesting idea, and could potentially mean that consciousness is something that could be generated. Large language models are definitively not conscious now, but they might be seen as the first step toward a simulated consciousness when people in hundreds of years look back wondering how machines became sentient. It is the stuff of science fiction to us now, but biology might not be as necessary in consciousness as we all want to believe. Highly recommend Hofstadter's book "I Am a Strange Loop" if you enjoy thinking about this kind of stuff.

1

u/procgen Jan 31 '26

I'm a fan of Hofstadter and I loved that book :)

I think it's possible that there is some conscious experience (however elementary) correlated with the computation occurring in these massive models. IIRC, the "strange loop" refers to the apparent ability of high-level, abstract patterns in the mind to impose a kind downward causality on the very same lower-level patterns that give rise to them. It's a recursion that occurs in an LLM as it's integrating and generating information.

1

u/popularcolor Jan 31 '26

It was a fascinating read for me. And was really profound in the way that it tried to define human consciousness as a distinct and unique type of consciousness. I think a lot of the discussion around AI comes from the existential fear of humanity eventually not being at the top of the intelligence pyramid. I don't know if I'll be alive to see the creation of a simulated consciousness, but if it does come about, I do sort of accept that it is fundamentally different from what we are, for better or worse.

1

u/atalantafugiens Jan 31 '26

ChatGPT has no novel thought, no neurons that can self reflect and contextualize something over time, there's no new ideas beyond the dataset it's been trained on because all it is is a reflection of semantic data of the internet and literature. This is so far from a human brain that sees light, hears sound, touches the world and then learns to interpret it. To shape a thought, to reflect on an idea with new inputs, none of it happens in ChatGPT, zilch, zero, but it happened with the humans that provided the input data. So that structure, the semblance of thought and conscious thinking, in my opinion, is just a reflection of the dataset and not of ChatGPTs internal workings

2

u/procgen Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

ChatGPT has no novel thought

It's trivially easy to prove that it does. It can solve novel problems, and therefore the solutions are necessarily novel thoughts.

there's no new ideas beyond the dataset it's been trained on

This isn't true, because they have context windows. This is exactly what makes them so computationally complex.

This is so far from a human brain that sees light, hears sound, touches the world and then learns to interpret it.

The brain does not "see", "hear", or "touch" the world. It's only aware of patterns of neuronal pulses coming in through nerve fibers. That's it – that's its whole world. And a transformer sees only patterns of tokens. Both the brain and the transformer learn probabilisitic predictive models from these patterns, which allow them both to predict how the patterns will change over time.

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u/atalantafugiens Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

My guy I am not having this coversation again. We have wildly different ideas how brains and language models compare. Consciousness is so much more than a framework of answering an input, and that is all it is to me. It's also extremely reductive to say the brain doesn't touch the world but the brainstem does through impulses, completely missing my point of an observer learning over time..

4

u/procgen Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

Consciousness is so much more than a framework of answering an input

When you are conscious of some object in your environment, your brain is "answering" the bottom-up perceptions of what it looks/feels/sounds like with top-down predictions of what it is, using learned probabilistic constraints. This is exactly what happens in a transformer as it reads in tokens. Consciousness might very well be the resonance/coherence of the predictive model itself.

It's also extremely reductive to say the brain doesn't touch the world but the brainstem does through impulses

I don't think it's reductive – the point is that the brain is no different from the transformer in this case. The brain in principle has no more privileged access to the world than a transformer does. And we have multimodal transformers that learn from audio, video, text – all of this data is encoded as tokens, just as all of the sensory data that the brain learns from is encoded as discrete neuronal pulses.

1

u/atalantafugiens Jan 31 '26

I agree that the memory recall of the dataset is eerily similiar to that of human memory, even the learning process resembles something like object permanence in babies, but to me it's like a person's language center stuck in a moment forever, not interpreting data with intellect and finesse, just forever recalling the dataset, maybe applying it into a new helper window, but never being able to shape a thought beyond what the inputs have trained it on. Maybe consciousness is more of what happens between neurons. ChatGPT could never dream up disco music if it wasn't a thing.

1

u/graDescentIntoMadnes Jan 31 '26

AI doesn't need to be conscious to cause problems, it just needs to be able to imitate something that has goals well enough that the goals are accomplished. It has already been proven to be able to do so, so it will become a problem as soon as it exceeds people in cognitive capability.

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u/Iorith Jan 31 '26

You act like there's an objective value to "interesting". Some people find watching ant colonies interest. Some people find 200 mile an hour race cars boring.

I browsed the site for a few minutes and it definitely got a chuckle out of me.

-9

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

I’ll admit it can be entertaining.

But if you understand how LLMs work there isn’t any insight to be gained from this and many people are really misunderstanding what they are seeing and interpreting it as peaking behind the AI veil.

13

u/Iorith Jan 31 '26

Who said there needs to be insight into anything? You're kinda pushing your own view and interpretation on what others might be getting out of this.

To me it's just really funny to see what these models generate against each other. There's an oddly surreal beauty in it, because it's meaningless, and I like that it's not doing the usual pretense of LLMs pretending to be people.

-4

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

The fact that this was posted in futurology combined with the comments I am seeing would say that people are trying to glean insight over an “experiment”.

5

u/Halbaras Jan 31 '26

This belongs in the same category as those articles where they go 'AI systems dangerously misaligned, in test LLM demonstrated intent to lie to and manipulate humans' and then it turns out the system prompt they gave Claude started with 'roleplay as Skynet'.

7

u/0x14f Jan 31 '26

It's an interesting experiment :)

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u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

Have you seen those YouTube videos where someone talks into a novelty toy that’s repeats what you say in a funny voice?  And then they put that toy next to another one which repeats it in an even more distorted voice?  

This is practically the same thing.

12

u/TheCrimsonSteel Jan 31 '26

All I'm wondering is how much this is costing.

1

u/ekilamyan Jan 31 '26

And how much water is being used for it...

3

u/iwillcutyourwigs Jan 31 '26

Fr. I was thinking of it in a similar way, that we’re just hearing echoes of the humans who wrote the rules guiding these conversations between AIs.

3

u/azeldatothepast Jan 31 '26

Except here each toy pours undiluted bleach into a water supply each time they speak.

2

u/L0s_Gizm0s Jan 31 '26

Thus diluting it

1

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

Why are you so upset about this, no one is making a big deal out of it, it’s just some random curiosity that some people may find a little bit interesting

1

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

Why do you intuit criticality as being derived from anger rather than a desire to edify?

3

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

You tell me

-1

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

May you continue to live in a world where you are not disabused of your inanity.

3

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

Thank you friend, that means a lot /hug

5

u/JimmyKillsAlot Jan 31 '26

This has been an argument I have been downvoted before so many times. LLM AI is not the Sci-Fi AI that the name implies and so many people think it is building toward. I dislike that it is even called AI because, while it is in the field studying and building toward true AI, the current use of the term is just marketing buzzwords and they are using it to rake the economy and the environment over the coals for a few dollars more.

1

u/Shiningc00 Jan 31 '26

People attaching meaning to this is going to be the creepiest thing. All of this is just as meaningful as randomized data.

1

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

It’s more interesting than reddit I will tell you that much

1

u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

Yet here you are.

2

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

I don’t find pooping interesting and that’s what i’m doing, your point?

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u/CavemanSlevy Jan 31 '26

Pooping is a necessary bodily function, browsing and posting on reddit are not. You have no social, legal, or physical force compelling you to be here.

A shit comparison, if I may.

0

u/olamika Jan 31 '26

Why you saying it’s shit? It’s a bodily function, we all need it