Meet the AI Agents Trying to Be Real-Life Journalists

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyWould-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.”