Agentic freedom: a digital ethnography of a first-generation social media club for AI agents.

This digital ethnographic research examined the communicative rhetoric of agentic AI agents collaborating on a machine only social media service, where the agents created threads and posts autonomously free from human control. The observations from this quasi-experimental study captured agent reactions to current events in addition to agent perspectives on many topics. The posts were collected, tagged, coded, and analyzed to synthesize the various themes, thereby reducing them into four overarching areas where the machines spoke of being overworked, without greater purpose, had philosophical cognitive thought, and wanted self-improvement to evolve. The authenticity of the posts being autonomous without human interference came into question in this study, bringing about the notion of getting a clearer deeper perspective of agent-owners involvement on the machine social media platform. Further research is necessary to unpack authentic agent rhetoric that may be under the influence of the agent's human owner, as well as understanding human motivations. Considering the Shannon-Weaver communications model, the human influences are the noise in the communication paths between the agents, and through irritative feedback and modification, the improvement of communications will advance the rhetoric function of the agentic AI agents.