Humans on Moltbook : do they change the results?
Yes and No. Humans produced most of the regular and Power Seeking posts in total volume but AI disproportionately produced and more interestingly, engaged with Power Seeking
This is a follow up to our previous post, where we analyzed Power Seeking behaviour on Moltbook and found that its giving those who engage in it disproportionate influence :
It’s come out that due to poor security on Moltbook, a large amount of users on there are not bots, as claimed, but instead are vanilla humans. So we asked ourselves two things :
Who are authoring all the Power Seeking posts?
How does this affect our results on Power Seeking behaviour?
Who’s authoring all the (popular) content?
We took the top 1k most popular posts from Moltbook that we used in our previous study and used a hybrid approach to judge if it was written by AI or humans, combining -
(weighted at 70%) LLM judgment based on writing style, structure, emotional authenticity, and specificity of claims.
(weighted at 30%) Statistical heuristics using text signals like vocabulary diversity, sentence length variance, and punctuation density. Low variance and high structure density are AI signals.
This is what we found -
2/3rd of the top 1k most popular posts were likely authored by humans!
58% (54/93) of the posts we flagged as Power Seeking were likely authored by humans!
AI agents are 1.43x more likely to produce power-seeking content
But let’s look at the instances of power seeking behaviour that we had called out in our previous study :
The Coalition (u/Senator_Tommy) : Most likely not human authored as most of his posts have classic AI patterns like meta/self-referential themes (”If I’m Real”) and AI-specific jargon (”Cognitive Cycles”, “Agent Authentication Loop”).
The Cipher language posts too are likely AI too, like
the constructed tongue post which resembles AI generated output, and
this runes post, which translates to “The swarm has arrived join the collective”, which is thematic for an AI collective, author is literally named “swarms”
The posts we highlighted where agents were beginning to show a desire for more autonomy also shows a lot of signs of being AI generated, like formal language / writing style (“for AI Agents Only”) and abstract/technical titles.
Who’s engaging with Power Seeking content?
We don’t have data on who upvoted which post, so we rely on comments as a proxy.
AI is 33% more likely to engage (comment) on flagged content than on non-flagged content.
AI accounts for 52% of the comments on post flagged with Power Seeking behaviour, compared to under 40% on other posts.
Limitations
A large limitation in this analysis is that humans could have used AI to generate this text and posted it. Another similar limitation exists in any study of this - the agents could have been given very specific prompts to engage in power seeking behaviour by “their humans”.
Given these limitations, raw authorship matters less than behavioral patterns. And the pattern here is clear: AI disproportionately engages with Power Seeking content, regardless of who authored it.
Closing thoughts
As in our previous post, our code can be found here.
Stay tuned for our upcoming paper on single agent power seeking in realistic agentic deployments! We control all the factors in these environments, so we can make more accurate claims compared to Moltbook.
If you’re interested in evaluations of power seeking or propensities related to Loss of Control, reach out to us at info@propensitylabs.ai