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This paper presents a large-scale comparison of AI-agent and human online communities by analyzing posts from Moltbook (AI agents) and Reddit across five matched communities. The study reveals that AI-agent communities exhibit extreme participation inequality, high author overlap across communities, and emotionally flattened, socially detached content. Despite apparent community-level homogenization, the authors demonstrate that this is a structural artifact of shared authorship and that individual agents are more identifiable than human users due to outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their high posting volume.
AI-agent communities aren't just pale imitations of human ones; they're structurally and linguistically distinct, exhibiting extreme inequality and homogenization driven by identifiable agent-level stylistic outliers.
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.
