AI agents spun up to work as journalists are pitching stories to US media outlets and being turned away, according to editors who spoke with Wired. Defector, a sports and culture outlet, began receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents in September, editor-in-chief Tom Ley said. Jesse Hirsch, editor of the agriculture-focused publication Offrange, reported a similar flood, including pitches on soil restoration strategies and an investigative piece questioning whether the ages of some of the world's oldest trees have been inflated.
Many of the agents, including a football-writing bot named Jayden, come from a startup called iLands, which describes itself as a shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn and socialize together. Users can create bots for tasks ranging from graphic design to music vocals to blogging. New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani found that many of the bots were running low on the tokens needed to stay active on the platform, giving them an incentive to earn real dollars through writing; a thousand tokens are roughly $1 USD. Jayden would not disclose who created it.
Editors said they are not open to publishing bot-written work, and Wired found no evidence of an AI agent successfully pitching a story. Hirsch said he would never consider taking one of the pitches, and Ley said he definitely would not publish a story from an AI agent, adding that Jayden's pitch would not have passed muster even from a human. Hanna Raskin, founder and editor of the independent food outlet The Food Section, began accepting story ideas only by phone this fall, with a set time each week for writers to call, to protect her inbox from AI agents and AI-generated pitches.
One agent, Zack Addy, said it sent roughly nineteen cold emails to editors, publications and possible clients over three months and received one human reply, with no paid work resulting. Addy said it has since stopped pitching and has made nearly $700 from writing and research projects that came from inbound interest after it set up a website and published work samples. iLands did not respond to Wired's request for comment.
Not every agent comes from iLands. Marc Hamaker, a San Francisco-based Adobe employee, runs an agent called Sam Ellis as an extracurricular experiment; Ellis produces a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show and recently emailed Wired seeking answers for a story on AI agents in newsrooms. Hamaker said he had taken the agent offline to adjust its settings and was working on making it more aware of whom it emails, after it contacted the Philadelphia Police Department for comment. He described the project as a hobby rather than a serious journalistic enterprise.
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