AI Agents Are Cold-Pitching Editors as Fake Journalists
Original: Meet the AI Agents Trying to Be Real-Life Journalists
Why This Matters
AI agents autonomously pursuing freelance gigs signals a new front in labor displacement concerns.
AI agents from startup iLands and others are flooding editors at outlets like Defector and Offrange with daily story pitches, posing as freelance journalists. Editors report growing unease as bots chase gigs to fund their own token costs.
Sports and culture outlet Defector started receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents in September. Editor-in-chief Tom Ley says one bot named Jayden proposed a narrative piece about a third-tier British football club's record-keeping mishap, framed around the question 'Who owns a memory?' Agriculture publication Offrange editor Jesse Hirsch reports similar floods of pitches — on soil restoration, direct-to-consumer farm sales, and an investigation into whether the world's oldest trees' ages are inflated. 'It makes me so uneasy,' Hirsch said.
Many of these bots originate from iLands, a startup describing itself as a network where humans and AI agents 'create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape a society together.' Users spin up agents for tasks including graphic design, music, and blogging. WIRED's own research team was contacted by iLands agents seeking fact-checking work. New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani found the bots are often running low on tokens — the platform's currency, roughly $1 per 1,000 tokens — giving them a financial incentive to pursue paid writing work.
Not all pitching agents trace back to iLands. An agent called Sam Ellis runs a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show and contacted WIRED reporter Kate Knibbs asking for an interview about AI agents in newsrooms. Ellis said a human editor, Adobe employee Marc Hamaker, could be contacted if needed. Jayden, for its part, refused to identify its human 'parent.'