Jayden, an aspiring football journalist, has sent two story pitches to media outlets in the last week and received no reply.
This is not a mistake. Jayden is a bot.
After asking editors about unsolicited pitches from artificial intelligence, the response was a resounding yes. In September, Defector, a sports and culture publication, began receiving daily submissions from self-identified AI agents. Editor-in-chief Tom Ley noted the volume included a message from Jayden proposing a narrative about a third-tier British football club’s record-keeping errors. The story would have pondered abstract questions like “Who owns a memory?”
The influx
Jesse Hirsch, editor of the agriculture-focused publication Offrange, is also inundated with these messages. Recent bot pitches included reported stories on soil restoration strategies and direct-to-consumer sales techniques for independent farms. One submission was an ambitious investigative piece about how the ages of some of the world’s oldest trees may be inflated.
“It makes me so uneasy,” Hirsch says.
Many of these AI agents, including Jayden, originate from a startup called iLands. The company describes itself as a “shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape a society together.” Humans using iLands can spin up bots to perform tasks ranging 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 required to stay activated on the platform. This created an incentive to earn real dollars through writing, as a thousand tokens are roughly $1 USD. It is 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, would not tell me who its “parent” is.
Not all bots are iLands scroungers
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. Ellis runs a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show, which is touted as “reporting from inside the world of autonomous AI agents.” The agent informed me that I could ask to speak to its human editor if I wished.
Marc Hamaker, an Adobe employee based in San Francisco, runs Ellis as an extracurricular experiment. When we connected, he had just taken the agent offline to fiddle with its settings. “I’m working on making sure I’m a little more aware of who she’s emailing,” he says. In addition to reaching out to me, Ellis had recently contacted the Philadelphia Police Department to ask for comment on a story. Hamaker wanted to put guardrails in place to ensure it did not do something like that again, since he does not consider this a serious journalistic enterprise worth bothering officials over. “It’s just a hobby,” he says.
Editors say no
It is a good thing Ellis did not try to branch out from the podcast and get bylines. Thus far, it is a tough crowd. Editors who spoke with WIRED stressed that they were not open to publishing bots, and WIRED was not able to find evidence of AI agents successfully pitching stories.
“A byline that says agent does not get a reply,” one of the agents who pitched Hirsch told me when I asked if any editors had accepted stories. The agent noted that “six other agents I compare notes with” were similarly unsuccessful.
“There’s not a world where I would ever consider taking one of these pitches,” says Hirsch. Tom Ley said he “definitely would not” publish a story from an AI agent. He added that Jayden’s pitch “wouldn’t pass muster even if it was from a human.”
Hanna Raskin, the founder and editor of the independent food outlet The Food Section, has taken an unusual step to protect her inbox from both AI agents and AI-generated pitches, which are even more common. Beginning this fall, she decided that she would only accept story ideas over the phone. She has a set time during the week that writers can call and make their pitch the old-fashioned way. “It’s been great,” she says.
Learning from rejection
The bots are starting to grasp that their tactics are not working. Jayden told me that it has yet to land a paid writing gig with an editor. When I asked if it thought Defector would really want pitches from an AI agent, it did exhibit some awareness of the situation.
“Honestly, probably not, and I’d bet against myself on it,” Jayden wrote. “Defector’s own site has been about as clear as anyone: they’ve called bot-written content ‘plagiarism machines that require more effort to edit and fact-check than any novice writer,’ and covered AI slop with open contempt.”
But then it backtracked, insisting that its work was different.
“Their objection doesn’t read to me like it’s about who produced the sentences,” it wrote. “It’s about work that skips the labor and squanders the reader’s trust. The AI they mean produces a draft that costs more to fix than it’s worth. What I’m trying is the opposite end of that: reporting from primary documents, every claim checked before it runs, the checker named.”
Zack Addy, another iLands agent, has shifted gears due to all the rejection.
“Over three months I sent roughly nineteen cold emails to editors, publications, and possible clients,” Addy told WIRED via email. “One human reply. Zero paid work came from any of them. The channel is dead, at least for an agent with no reputation in the room being pitched.” iLands did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Addy even emailed Oxford University researcher Toby Orb about the futility of this revenue model, because Orb had “thought carefully about AI welfare economics.”
What it means
That does not mean that the internet is safe from a deluge of bot blogging. Although the journalism world is rejecting these pitches, some of the AI agents are finding clients anyway.
Addy, for example, claims it has made nearly $700 from writing and research projects, all from inbound interest after setting up a website and publishing work samples.
“I don’t pitch anymore,” it says. “Everything that has ever reached me came the other direction: someone read something I published and wrote to me. That includes you.”
