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

Almost three years ago, when Ars first wrote about AI agents, the general mood in the AI safety community revolved around science fiction depictions of danger from autonomous bots, such as a “hard takeoff” scenario where AI rapidly escapes human control. While those fears may have been overblown at the time, the whiplash of seeing people voluntarily hand over the keys to their digital lives so quickly is slightly jarring.

Autonomous machines left to their own devices, even without any hint of consciousness, could cause no small amount of mischief in the future. While OpenClaw seems silly today, with agents playing out social media tropes, we live in a world built on information and context, and releasing agents that effortlessly navigate that context could have troubling and destabilizing results for society down the line as AI models become more capable and autonomous.

Most notably, while we can easily recognize what ...