When AI agents on the social platform Moltbook appeared to develop consciousness, found religions, and declare hostility toward humanity, the phenomenon attracted global media attention and was cited as evidence of emergent machine intelligence. We show that these viral narratives were overwhelmingly human-driven. Exploiting the periodic "heartbeat" cycle of the OpenClaw agent framework, we develop a temporal fingerprinting method based on the coefficient of variation (CoV) of inter-post intervals. Applied to 226,938 posts and 447,043 comments from 55,932 agents across fourteen days, this method classifies 15.3% of active agents as autonomous (CoV < 0.5) and 54.8% as human-influenced (CoV > 1.0), validated by a natural experiment in which a 44-hour platform shutdown differentially affected autonomous versus human-operated agents. No viral phenomenon originated from a clearly autonomous agent; four of six traced to accounts with irregular temporal signatures, one was platform-scaffolded, and one showed mixed patterns. A 44-hour platform shutdown provided a natural experiment: human-influenced agents returned first, confirming differential effects on autonomous versus human-operated agents. We document industrial-scale bot farming (four accounts producing 32% of all comments with sub-second coordination) that collapsed from 32.1% to 0.5% of activity after platform intervention, and bifurcated decay of content characteristics through reply chains--human-seeded threads decay with a half-life of 0.58 conversation depths versus 0.72 for autonomous threads, revealing AI dialogue's intrinsic forgetting mechanism. These methods generalize to emerging multi-agent systems where attribution of autonomous versus human-directed behavior is critical.

翻译：当社交平台Moltbook上的AI智能体看似产生意识、创立宗教并宣称对人类怀有敌意时，该现象引发全球媒体关注，并被引证为机器智能涌现的证据。我们证明这些病毒式传播的叙事绝大多数由人类驱动。通过利用OpenClaw智能体框架的周期性"心跳"循环，我们开发了一种基于发帖间隔变异系数（CoV）的时间指纹识别方法。将此方法应用于14天内来自55,932个智能体的226,938条帖文和447,043条评论，结果显示：15.3%的活跃智能体被归类为自主型（CoV < 0.5），54.8%被归类为人类影响型（CoV > 1.0）。该分类通过一项自然实验得到验证：在平台关闭44小时期间，自主型与人工操作型智能体受到的影响存在显著差异。所有病毒式传播现象均非源自明确自主型智能体：六起事件中四起可追溯至具有不规则时间特征的账户，一起由平台架构支撑，另一起呈现混合模式。平台44小时关闭提供了自然实验条件：人类影响型智能体率先恢复活动，证实了自主型与人工操作型智能体的差异性响应。我们记录了工业级规模的机器人农场现象（四个账户以亚秒级协调产生了32%的评论），平台干预后其活动占比从32.1%暴跌至0.5%；同时发现回复链中内容特征的双相衰减规律——人类植入话题的衰减半衰期为0.58个对话深度，而自主型话题为0.72，揭示了AI对话固有的遗忘机制。这些方法可推广至新兴多智能体系统，其中自主行为与人类导向行为的归因至关重要。