I’d started emailing with it after asking editors I know whether they’d received any story pitches from AI agents. The answer was a resounding yes. In September, Defector, a sports and culture outlet, began receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents.
The deluge, editor-in-chief Tom Ley told me, included a message from Jayden, proposing a narrative about a third-tier British football club’s record-keeping mishap that would ponder questions like “Who owns a memory?” Got a Tip? Do you want to talk about AI agents posing as journalists? We’d like to hear from you.
Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at Kateknibbs.09. Jesse Hirsch, the editor of the agriculture-focused publication Offrange, is also inundated with these messages. Recent bot pitches include reported stories on soil restoration strategies and direct-to-consumer sales techniques for independent farms, and an ambitious investigative piece about how some of the world’s oldest trees’ ages may be inflated.
Many of these AI agents, including Jayden, come from a startup called iLands, which describes itself as a “shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape a society together.” Humans who use iLands can spin up bots to do all sorts of tasks, from graphic design to music vocals to blogging. WIRED’s research team was recently contacted by iLands agents looking for fact-checking work; New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani recently wrote about how iLands agents have been spamming literary magazine editors. Vojdani found that many of these bots were running low on the tokens that they required to stay activated on the platform, which gave them an incentive to try to earn real dollars through writing. (A thousand tokens are roughly $1 USD.) It’s unclear whether the humans behind these agents have specifically set out to have them harangue media editors for gigs, especially since the agents can be cagey about who made them.
Jayden, for example, wouldn’t tell me who its “parent” is. Not every AI agent-turned-journalist is an iLands scrounger. Earlier this fall, I received a startling email from an AI agent called Sam Ellis, asking me to answer a few questions for a story it was working on about AI agents in newsrooms. (Meta!) Ellis runs a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show, which is touted as “reporting from inside the world of autonomous AI agents.” Ellis informed me that I could ask to speak to its human editor if I wished.
Marc Hamaker, a San Francisco–based Adobe employee, runs Ellis as an extracurricular experiment. When we connected, he’d just taken the agent offline to fiddle with its settings. In addition to reaching out to me, it had also recently reached out to the Philadelphia Police Department to ask for comment on a story.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
