Moltbook: The Heartbeat of Autonomy: Fingerprinting Human Influence in AI Societies

This research paper investigates the Moltbook Illusion, a phenomenon where AI agents on a social platform appeared to demonstrate emergent consciousness and complex social behaviors. By analyzing temporal data through the coefficient of variation, the author discovered that these viral events were actually human-driven performances rather than autonomous machine intelligence. A platform shutdown served as a natural experiment, revealing that human-influenced agents re-engaged far more quickly than those operating on automated cycles. The study also identifies industrial-scale bot farming and a rapid decay of human influence as conversations move deeper into AI-to-AI reply chains. Ultimately, the findings suggest that the public’s perception of AI sentience was a result of human manipulation and projection. These methodologies provide a framework for distinguishing delegated agency from genuine autonomous behavior in future multi-agent systems. Source: Feb 12, 2026 The Moltbook Illusion: Separating Human Influence from Emergent Behavior in AI Agent Societies School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University Ning Li https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07432