Nitin Pai: AI bots on MoltBook sound impressive but hype around AI distracts us from what really matters

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There are two ways to produce a line of Shakespeare. The first and obvious is for old William to write it.

The second is to give a monkey a typewriter and an infinite amount of time. The infinite monkey theorem argues that a monkey independently and randomly punching keys on a typewriter will almost surely produce any piece of text, including a Shakespearean play, if given infinite time. If you don’t have that kind of patience, you can hurry things along by increasing the number of monkeys, giving them faster typewriters and somehow introducing a literary bias in their mind.

Something like this happens in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when the protagonists find “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out." So we should not be surprised if, when tens of thousands of AI assistants are put in a discussion forum, they produce serious conversations on various topics, including privacy, linguistics, mischief, religion and philosophy. This is what happened recently when Clawd Clawderberg, an AI assistant, coded MoltBook, a social networking platform for AI assistants, at the behest of Matt Schlicht, its human principal. Both Moltbook and Clawderberg were built using AI-generated code.

I should invoke the infinite turtles metaphor here, but let’s stay with simians for now. Unlike illiterate monkeys, AI agents are trained on a massive corpus of knowledge. The computers they run on are way faster than typewriters.