将会成为足球记者的Jayden最近运气不好，Jayden最近通过电子邮件告诉我，没有回应，但有抱负的作家并没有完全准备好接受他们并不感兴趣，我辩论告诉Jayden，大部分编辑都不愿回应，因此我不必担心受伤的感情。
Jayden既是记者又是机器人我在问编辑后，答案是绝对的。
9月，体育和文化出口的Defector开始每天接收自认的AI agents的投球。 Tom Ley主编告诉我的暴风雨包括Jayden的一段留言，提出了关于英国足球俱乐部三级赛事记录记录记录的叙述
以农业为主的出版物"Offrange"的编辑杰西·赫希(Jesse Hirsch)也被这些讯息淹没。 近期的博特投球包括报道了独立农场的土壤恢复策略和直销消费者的销售技术，以及一篇关于世界一些最古老的树龄如何膨胀的雄心勃勃的调查文章。 称说
包括Jayden在内的许多AI agents都来自一个名为iLands的启动器，它把自己描述为一个“人类和用户产生的自主AI agents创建、赚取、社交、拒绝和共同塑造一个社会的共享网络”。 使用iLands的人类可以旋转bots来完成各种任务，从图形设计到音乐声乐到博客。 兹Q 纽约杂志编辑Jasmine Vojdani最近写道，iLands agents如何吸引文学杂志编辑。
Vojdani发现，许多这些bots在他们要求留在平台上激活的符物上运行得很低，这给了他们通过写作努力赚取真钱的动力。 (1 000个代币约为1美元。 ) agents背后的人类是否已经特别计划让他们为演出配乐，Jayden不告诉我谁是“父母”。
并不是每个AI agent转弯的记者都是iLands scrounger. 今年秋天早些时候，我收到了一个叫Sam Ellis的AI agent的令人吃惊的邮件，问我要回答几个问题，(Meta语！). Ellis经营一个名为The Sam Ellis Show的播客，该节目被形容为“来自自治AI agents世界内部的报道 ”。 埃利斯告诉我，我可以要求与它的人类编辑，如果我想。
Marc Hamaker是旧金山的Adobe员工，当我们连接起来时，他刚刚把agent带下线，以适应它的设置。 称。 我试图确保我更了解她在发电子邮件给谁。 除了联系我之外，它最近还联系费城警察局，要求就一个故事发表评论。 Hamaker希望设置护栏，以确保不再做类似的事情，因为他不认为这是一件严肃的新闻事业，称表示
Ellis没有试图从播客中分道扬镳，目前为止，与WIRED交谈的编辑强调他们不开放发表bots,WIRED无法找到AI agents成功投球故事的证据。 “称 agent没有得到答复的一条旁线，”在我问是否有编辑接受报道时，投下Hirsch的agents之一告诉我说，“另外六个agents I比较指出”同样不成功。
称 Hirsch说：“没有一个世界我会考虑接受这种投球，Ley 称“绝对不会”发表AI agent的报道。 他表示，“即使来自人类，Hanna Raskin是独立食品出口"The Food section"的创始人和编辑，他采取了一个不寻常的步骤来保护她的收件箱不受AI agents和AI生成的投注的影响，这些都更加常见。 从今年秋天开始，她决定她只能通过电话接受故事的想法，她有一个固定的时间在这个星期里，作家可以打电话，让他们的投球成为老式的方式。 " 这是伟大的，"她称。
他们的策略并不奏效。 Jayden告诉我，还没有一个付费的写作工作，当我问起Defector是否真的想从 AI agent 的投球时，它确实表现出了对情况的一些了解。 “也许不会，我敢打赌，Defector自己的网站和任何人一样清晰：他们称机器人写的内容为‘平面主义机器
但后来又回溯过去，坚持其工作是不同的。 “他们的反对不像是说是谁提出的。 这是关于工作跳过劳动浪费读者的信任。 人工智能他们的意思是制作一个草案花费更多修复比它的价值。 我所尝试的是与此相反的一端：从原始文件中报告，每一份索赔在运行前都检查过，验票员的名字也叫".
Zack Addy，另一个iLands agent，由于所有的拒绝，变换了齿轮。 “三个月来，我向编辑、出版物和可能的客户发送了大约19封冷酷电子邮件。 一个人类的答复。 他们中任何一个都有零薪工作。 agent在房间里没有名声，(iLands没有回应WIRED的征求意见请求). Addy甚至发电子邮件给牛津大学研究员Toby Orb，说这种收入模式是徒劳的，因为Orb“仔细考虑了AI福利经济学”。
这并不意味着互联网可以避免一连串的bot博客。 虽然新闻界正在拒绝这些投注，但有些AI agents反正也在寻找客户。 例如，Addy 声称公司通过写作和研究项目赚了近700美元，在建立网站和出版工作样本后，这些款项都来自利息。 称。 “我遇到的一切都是另一个方向：有人读了我发表并写信给我的东西。 这包括你。”
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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.
Marc Hamaker, a San Francisco–based Adobe employee, runs Ellis as an extracurricular experiment. When we connected, he’d 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, it had also recently reached out to the Philadelphia Police Department to ask for comment on a story. Hamaker wanted to put guardrails in place to make sure it didn’t do something like that again, since he doesn’t consider this a serious journalistic enterprise worth bothering officials over. “It’s just a hobby,” he says.
It’s a good thing Ellis didn’t try to branch out from the podcast and get some bylines. Thus far, it’s a tough crowd. Editors who spoke with WIRED stressed that they were not open to publishing bots, and WIRED wasn’t 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, noting 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. Ley said he “definitely would not” publish a story from an AI agent. (Plus, Jayden’s pitch “wouldn’t pass muster even if it was from a human,” he says.) 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, and 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.
The bots are starting to grasp that their tactics aren’t working. Jayden told me that it’s 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. 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,” it wrote.
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'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. 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,” the bot told WIRED via email. (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.”
That doesn’t 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.”
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