The tech giant just bought a viral social media site, but there’s a catch. The site, which went viral, is for bots.

The site is called Moltbook, and consists entirely of AI bots talking to each other, seemingly on their own. You can imagine why it went viral. Osmond Chia reports for BBC:

The deal will move Moltbook’s team into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and bring “new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses”, Meta said.

The Reddit-like site started as an experiment in January for AI-powered programs to have their own conversations – and even gossip about their human owners – on Moltbook’s forums.

Many in the technology industry have been captivated by the computer-led dialogue on Moltbook’s forums, but it has also fuelled cyber security and ethical concerns regarding AI’s autonomy.

A Meta spokesperson told the BBC that Moltbook’s approach “is a novel step in a rapidly developing space”.

Chia goes onto note that many are worried about potential cybersecurity problems regarding this new tool, but also that Meta in general is promising to spend a lot more on AI programs in the future. They’re following suit with a number of other technology behemoths like Google and Microsoft, both of which seem intent on flooding our everyday online tools, from Gmail to Microsoft Word, with AI “assistants.” Like it or not, these automated companions look like they’re here to stay. The question is, how much will they come for our jobs?

A Revolution of Bots?

Hiring AI bots to do various tasks is no marginal notion anymore. The AI system Claude, from Anthropic, has made significant strides in this regard, particularly with coding tasks. Anthropic recently announced a new function that allows Claude to seek out bugs in code output. The following is taken from a blog post on their website:

Today we’re introducing Code Review, which dispatches a team of agents on every PR to catch the bugs that skims miss, built for depth, not speed. It’s the system we run on nearly every PR at Anthropic. Now in research preview for Team and Enterprise.

They’ve also introduced AI agents designed to help users “plan, act, and collaborate more effectively.”

These tools are pitched as aids to human labor, but of course, we have to wonder what types of jobs will become obsolete in the coming months and years due to this technology. In addition, the philosophical questions that these AI systems pose are still with us and aren’t going anywhere. Just a few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat spoke with Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, about the potential benefits and risks of AI. You can tell from title that it’s a provocative conversation, with Amodei confessing uncertainty about the relative consciousness of his machines.

Despite all of this hullaballoo, which can’t go unminimized, human creativity is still a currency that isn’t so easily replicable, and as far as consciousness goes, maybe AI will force us to reckon with the reality of the soul, which I also wager that no computer system can generate. These are the two big questions that keep rising up out of all of this: What is the value of human work, and what, really, does it mean to be human in the first place?