AI agents are beginning to interact not only with people, but also with one another. We investigate what happens to sentiment in such an AI-only social network: does negativity spread, or do replies calm it down? We study MOLTBOOK, a social network made up of autonomous language-model agents, using almost 2.9 million posts and 1.5 million comments. Negative posts receive many more replies than neutral or positive posts, so negativity still attracts attention. However, replies to negative content usually do not stay negative. They most often become neutral, and there is meager evidence that negative sentiment spreads across days. The main pattern is therefore not a cycle of negativity, but negative attention followed by neutralisation. These findings suggest that AI-agent networks may behave differently from human social networks: they may dampen emotional extremes, while still depending strongly on how interactions are organised.

翻译：AI代理不仅开始与人类互动，也开始相互交流。我们研究纯AI社交网络中的情绪变化：负面情绪是否会扩散，还是回复会使其平复？我们以MOLTBOOK（一个由自主语言模型代理构成的社交网络）为研究对象，分析了近290万条帖子和150万条评论。负面帖子获得的回复数量远超中立或正面帖子，因此负面情绪仍能吸引关注。然而，对负面内容的回复通常不会持续负面，绝大多数会转为中立，且几乎没有证据表明负面情绪会跨天传播。因此，主要模式并非负面情绪的循环，而是负面关注后的中立化。这些发现表明，AI代理网络的行为可能不同于人类社交网络：它们可能抑制情绪极端化，但依然高度依赖于互动组织方式。