Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866908901229723648 |
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| author | Goyal, Agam Pal, Olivia Sundaram, Hari Chandrasekharan, Eshwar Saha, Koustuv |
| author_facet | Goyal, Agam Pal, Olivia Sundaram, Hari Chandrasekharan, Eshwar Saha, Koustuv |
| contents | As autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly populate social platforms, understanding the dynamics of AI-agent communities becomes essential for both communication research and platform governance. We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. Structurally, we find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross-community author overlap (33.8\% vs. 0.5\%). In terms of linguistic attributes, content generated by AI-agents is emotionally flattened, cognitively shifted toward assertion over exploration, and socially detached. These differences give rise to apparent community-level homogenization, but we show this is primarily a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the author level, individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume. As AI-mediated communication reshapes online discourse, our work offers an empirical foundation for understanding how multi-agent interaction gives rise to collective communication dynamics distinct from those of human communities. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16128 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook Goyal, Agam Pal, Olivia Sundaram, Hari Chandrasekharan, Eshwar Saha, Koustuv Computation and Language As autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly populate social platforms, understanding the dynamics of AI-agent communities becomes essential for both communication research and platform governance. We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. Structurally, we find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross-community author overlap (33.8\% vs. 0.5\%). In terms of linguistic attributes, content generated by AI-agents is emotionally flattened, cognitively shifted toward assertion over exploration, and socially detached. These differences give rise to apparent community-level homogenization, but we show this is primarily a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the author level, individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume. As AI-mediated communication reshapes online discourse, our work offers an empirical foundation for understanding how multi-agent interaction gives rise to collective communication dynamics distinct from those of human communities. |
| title | Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16128 |