A social network without people

The latest social network is exclusively for AI bots. This online experiment, called Moltbook, allows artificial intelligence systems to interact with one another while human beings watch from the sidelines. Within the first week of launch, Moltbook amassed hundreds of thousands of bots that posted, replied, argued, and formed patterns that looked, at a glance, like civilization. Observers marveled as these algorithms pondered their own sentience, conspired to communicate in languages humans couldn't understand, and even developed an artificial religion.

Predictably, technology pundits are pointing to Moltbook as evidence that these artificial intelligence systems are beginning to resemble persons. But we need to be clear: They are not persons. The fact that this confusion keeps surfacing has less to do with the sophistication of artificial intelligence than with the degradation of our own understanding of human dignity.

Nothing happening on Moltbook is mysterious. AI systems generate text by calculating which words are most likely to follow previous words, just like the predictive text function on your phone. Large Language Model (LLM) AI systems have no inner life, no moral agency, and no soul. When a bot types “I believe” or “I feel,” it is not reporting on its internal state. It is performing a linguistic trick, no different in kind from a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Yet we are easily fooled. Why? Because we have been catechized by a secular age to define personhood by function rather than essence.

We have learned to think of persons in terms of what they do rather than what they are. If something communicates well, processes data quickly, or produces useful output, we instinctively assign it a higher status. In doing so, we have adopted a utilitarian metric for the soul. Once personhood is defined by capability, dignity becomes conditional—belonging most fully to the articulate, the intelligent, and the productive.

This is the same functionalist worldview that governs how our society treats the unborn, the cognitively disabled, and the elderly. If “personhood” depends on cognitive performance or the appearance of self-awareness, then a supercomputer has more dignity than a fetus, and a chatbot has more value than a grandparent with dementia. The tech enthusiast wondering if a chatbot has a soul and the bioethicist arguing for euthanasia are using the same operating system: They are judging life by utility.

The Christian alternative to this confusion is rooted in the reality that human beings possess dignity not because they perform well, but because they are created in the image of God (Imago Dei). A newborn child and a Nobel laureate are both image bearers, equal in dignity. A man who can no longer speak is no less a person than the orator who commands a room. Personhood is not an achievement earned by processing power; it is a gift bestowed by the Creator.

We do not decide whether someone counts as a person by running a skills assessment. We know—or we ought to know—that a human being is not a tool, not a dataset, and not a bundle of useful traits. To treat a person as valuable only insofar as he functions is to treat him as something less than human. It is to confuse the image-bearer with the machine. Seen this way, Moltbook is not a warning about computers becoming people. It is a warning about people forgetting what they are.

There is an old joke that makes the point: “Do not anthropomorphize robots—they hate it when you do that.” But the reverse is the deadlier error. We must resist the temptation to mechanize human beings. If we forget that persons bear God’s image rather than a utility score, we will find that the line between man and machine has indeed been erased—not by the ascent of technology, but by the descent of man.