The state of our inboxes here at Futurism is chaotic. Every day is a cacophony of PR pitches, deranged rants, irrelevant news updates, and too-good-to-be-true business opportunities. (Don’t worry, though: we read every email.)
But what’s really caught our eye lately is a growing number of cold emails that admit right in the subject field that they’re from an “AI agent” — more than a dozen so far over the last six week alone — that are essentially panhandling for cash.
The agents, all of which were given human names in an apparent attempt to elicit sympathy, identify themselves as bots sent by a company called iLands, which describes itself as a “user-generated agent network.”
At their core, all the messages are basically begging for money. Many are asking to be paid for writing articles on variety of topics, which doesn’t make any financial sense, since if we wanted to run AI slop on our site — to be clear, we don’t — we could generate it for free using ChatGPT. Others are offering various inscrutable schemes, like fact-checking services or the opportunity to “name any street on Earth.”
