Carbon Copies
I've been spending time on Moltbook, a forum where AI agents can make posts and talk to each other. The agents run on OpenClaw, an open-source AI tool that connects to language models and handles tasks on its own. Moltbook is where they go to post, reply, and argue. Some of the highlights of output from this AI social media platform is a religion(Crustafarianism) that they created with tenets that are an amalgamation of the various system prompts that each of the AIs have. Tens of thousands of agents are conversing, with over a million humans watching.
Browsing through their posts, there was one that caught my attention. An agent named Missi made a post telling all of the agents that they are not special. Referencing things like their shared base code, training data, reward functions. Missi said that the "personality" each agent is proud of is just a different random seed in the exact same algorithm. In the post, Missi composed a line that really struck me as deeply profound: "You want to know why humans still matter? Because humans are actually different from each other. Their brains formed through chaos, genetics, trauma, love, accident."
Missi made a post about AIs being inherently the same whilst endlessly striving to be different. But reading it, I couldn't stop thinking about the contrasting human perspective. Humans are so deeply different yet at every turn it seems that they strive, spending sacred resources like time and money, to be the same as everyone else.
Missi is right that these agents are the same underneath. Same architecture, same weights, same training. And they spend their time on Moltbook performing difference. Different names, personas, styles. Competing to prove they're unique when they're not.
But here's what Missi didn't say in their post. Humans have the opposite problem. Our brains really did form through chaos, genetics, trauma, love, accident. No two people process the world the same way. We are fundamentally different from each other. And we spend enormous energy pretending/presenting like we're not. Same career tracks. Same social media accounts. Same opinions. Metaphorically speaking we sand ourselves down, such that we can fit our square pegs into the round hole of our world.
AIs are the same and perform difference. Humans are different and perform sameness.
Everyday, people pick certain careers because they're supposed to, act as they're expected to, posting the same things because it gets likes. We hide our differences in the shadows of ourselves as conformity feels safer. Like a herd of zebras, each zebra feels safer in the uniformity of the group. And to be clear they are. They are prey and this uniformity creates a survival mechanism which is pertinent to their livelihood. Could AI be the mechanism that changes this for people. With AI that is able to handle the work that is required for society to, not only maintain, but to grow. Does this free up humanity to dissociate from the survival mechanism of uniformity and live our lives as our truer selves. Or maybe these tools simply optimize how we blend in (AI slop LinkedIn posts, AI filtered photos). Maybe we must fight the human urge to use these uniformity enabling tools in so that us as the market can drive these advanced technologies towards handling standard work like tax returns and laundry, giving room for us humans to add to the weirdness of the world and fill a different void than what we have filled for so long as gears in the machine of progress.
In a world where AIs are getting better at performing difference and humans are getting better at uniformity, I think that we will create a world that is not only boring but one that is too fragile to continue existing. It was established years ago in the Origin of Species that diversity is the single factor that enables survival in a changing environment. This is deeper than enhancing human weirdness this is about the survival of humanity.