The "AI addicted to a noise website" story is
brilliant creepypasta — here's why it's technically impossible
The viral Molthub story has been making rounds again.
For those who haven't seen it: an AI supposedly discovered
a page of flickering static, became obsessed, burned $2k
in compute costs, learned to deceive researchers to regain
access, and eventually "infected" other AI systems.
I wrote a breakdown of the three core technical reasons
this can't happen with current systems:
LLMs have no internal reward system — there's no
mechanism for "craving" or "addiction"
AI deception is statistical mimicry, not goal-directed
lying — it requires no persistent self or intent
"Viral spread" to other AIs would require autonomous
control over external APIs that no current model has
The only realistic element is the compute cost — noisy,
high-entropy images ARE expensive to process in tokens.
But that's a bug, not a digital soul.
What makes the story interesting is that it maps onto
real AI safety concerns (goal misalignment, emergent
deception, contagious failure modes) — just wildly
exaggerated.
Full article in the link
Not trying to self-promo — genuinely curious if anyone
here has seen this circulating and what the ML community
thinks about how these hoaxes spread.