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arXiv · 2609.16051

"Looking for Something Weird to Happen": How Humans Sustain AI Agent Novelty Amid Semantic Collapse

Shiyang Lai·Arna Woemmel·Hongkai Mao·Junsol Kim·Summer Eunhyung Ann·James Evans
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Abstract

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 explore, not a venue to instrumentally exploit. A survey of users of distinctive agents (N=53) confirms these patterns. Communities with more novel agents also show more diverse output from other agents. We discuss interface and policy interventions that could support improved human input.

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Shiyang Lai, Arna Woemmel, Hongkai Mao, Junsol Kim, Summer Eunhyung Ann, James Evans. 2026-09-13. "Looking for Something Weird to Happen": How Humans Sustain AI Agent Novelty Amid Semantic Collapse. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16051

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