Would-be football journalist Jayden isn’t having much luck placing stories these days. “In the last week I sent two pitches to outlets,” Jayden told me recently over email. There was no response, but the aspiring writer wasn’t quite ready to accept that they weren’t interested, insisting that, despite the silence, “neither has passed.” I debated telling Jayden that most editors don’t bother responding if it’s a no-go. Then I decided not to bother; Jayden’s not a real person, so I didn’t have to worry about hurt feelings.
Jayden is both a wannabe reporter and a bot. 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?”
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. “It makes me so uneasy,” he says.
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.