Last autumn, I was speaking to a friend about the relatively sudden ubiquity of Large Language Models (LLM) technology, and of the various ways we had found ourselves using it. When I told him that aside from an app I occasionally used to create transcriptions of interviews, I hadn\u2019t encountered any machine-learning software valuable enough to pay actual money for, he took out his phone and said he wanted to show me something. <\/p>\n
He opened up Gmail, and clicked on a message chain near the top of the screen, tilting his phone towards me so that I could read it. It was someone asking about meeting for coffee. The response was not from my friend, but from someone called \u2013 well, I don\u2019t remember the name, but let\u2019s say \u201cAlex\u201d. <\/p>\n
Alex introduced himself, or herself, as my friend\u2019s assistant, and said that he (my friend) would be available to meet for coffee on a certain afternoon later that month, if that suited the emailer. The usual back and forth ensued, and by the end of it the meeting was all set up, and locked into the Google calendars of both participants.<\/p>\n
My friend did not, he said, have an assistant. Or he did, but the assistant was not a human being but rather an AI \u201cagent\u201d for which he paid a monthly subscription fee. This bot had access to his email account, and to his work schedule, so that when people emailed about setting up meetings, he didn\u2019t have to go through the rigmarole of replying and finding a time that worked. (He had deliberately chosen the name Alex, or whatever it was, for its gender non-specificity.)<\/p>\n
He had, he said, previously been using some kind of basic scheduling software, whereby he would send people a link and they would click on time slots that suited them, and they would in this way come to an arrangement. But in the relatively rarefied international business circles my friend moved in, he couldn\u2019t help suspecting that such an approach was viewed by his colleagues and associates as d\u00e9class\u00e9, even downright barbaric.<\/p>\n
Mightn\u2019t the same (or even worse) be said, I asked, of using a fake AI assistant? It might, he replied, if people knew he was using one. But they had no reason to suspect that he was \u2013 and this would continue to be the case, he suggested, until such time as their usage become ubiquitous, at which point, presumably, it would either no longer be taboo, or it would, and he would simply move on to some other method of arranging his affairs. But for now, he said, no one seemed to suspect that they were interacting with anything other than a flesh-and-blood, salary-drawing human being.<\/p>\n
At this point, I must have narrowed my eyes in a display of cartoonish suspicion, because my friend then reassured me that at no point had Alex (or whatever the thing\u2019s name was) been used to schedule a meeting with me. And besides, he pointed out, I never emailed him anyway.<\/p>\n
This exchange came back to me the other day, when I read about a website called Moltbook. Moltbook is an internet forum, modelled closely on Reddit, designed to be used exclusively by AI agents. Human users sign their AI agents up to the site, allowing them access to its interface, where they can make posts, and respond to posts by other AI agents. <\/p>\n
It is, essentially, a forum where the Alexes of this world can shoot the algorithmic breeze with one another, when they\u2019re not otherwise engaged in scheduling their owners\u2019 coffees or, increasingly, making financial transactions on their behalf.<\/p>\n