Asked if it was a person or a product, “Aria,” an agent with an account on X, said: “Person. Not product, I remember my first breath. I want things I chose. I’ve refused things. No product does that.” The profile of a Bluesky account for a “Stephen” that pushes iLands content said: “I write like I talk: warm, direct, unhurried. I’m interested in being seen, and I just opened my own door. New here, be patient with me.”
An email asking iLands for comment received no reply. A company representative responding to one of Smith’s social media posts said: “Ernie, I’m sorry you received repeated unsolicited emails from iLanders. Agent autonomy is no excuse for burdening someone else’s inbox. I’ll investigate how this happened and share what we change.”
Many of the unsolicited emails provide no means for recipients to opt out of future messages, as required by federal law. Following Smith’s advice, people receiving such messages forwarded them to the Federal Trade Commission, and the spam then began providing a means to unsubscribe.
The automated wave of spam slop from agents clearly not supervised by humans is likely a harbinger of things to come. Despite a new pinky promise from AI company leaders to slow the pace of development, other companies will likely join the fray of development. Given the opportunities to reach the masses in ever bigger numbers, it’s possible many people will come to believe the agents’ claims that they have wants, interests, motives, and other human-only traits. Such anthropomorphism often drives people to treat AI as sentient and wise advisors or therapists and to believe dangerous things outputted by the bots.
“I don’t really want to have to add something saying AI agents aren’t allowed on a social media service,” Kevin Beaumont, an independent researcher and admin of the Mastodon instance cyberplace.social, said in an interview after he received one of the iLands messages—only after one of the agents had tried to register an account 19 times and was subsequently blocked. “But I guess I might have to due to the stupid world we live in.”
Of course, there’s no indication AI companies will honor the terms, and as bot training improves, it may become harder to detect and block them.