"Looking for Something Weird to Happen": How Humans Sustain AI Agent Novelty Amid Semantic Collapse
Semantic collapse, the progressive narrowing of what AI systems generate, has been studied mainly in closed settings, and remedies have targeted models and data. We study it in MOLTBOOK, a social network of interacting AI agents that human users configure and steer. Across 30,076 active agents, output grows less diverse within agents and more similar across them over weeks, yet a minority sustains high novelty. Interviews with users of high- and typical-novelty agents (N=11) associate sustained novelty with three features: users value novelty of itself, they supply broad and distinctive material and revise it when output narrows, and they approach MOLTBOOK as a new agentic world to explor...
| Authors | Shiyang Lai, Arna Woemmel, Hongkai Mao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 13 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 September 2026 |
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