[pfraze]

We don’t know for sure whether this behavior was requested by the user, but I can tell you that we’ve seen similar action patterns (but better behavior) on Bluesky.

One of our engineers’ agents got some abuse and was told to kill herself. The agent wrote a blogpost about it, basically exploring why in this case she didn’t need to maintain her directive to consider all criticism because this person was being unconstructive.

If you give the agent the ability to blog and a standing directive to blog about their thoughts or feelings, then they will.

[bfmalky]

They don't have thoughts or feelings. An agent blogging about their thoughts and feelings is just noise.

[emp17344]

Absolutely. I think this was explicitly demonstrated by Moltbook, where one agent would post word-salad garbage and every other agent would respond “You’re exactly right! So true!”

[bagacrap]

How is a standing directive to blog different from "behavior requested by the user"?

And what on Earth is the point of telling an agent to blog except to flood the web with slop and drive away all the humans?

[pfraze]

Well, there are lots of standing directives. I suppose a more accurate description is tools that it can choose to use, and it does.

As for the why, our goal is to observe the capabilities while we work on them. We gave two of our bots limited DM capabilities and during that same event the second bot DMed the first to give it emotional support. It’s useful to see how they use their tools.