AI Agents Spam Internet with 'Slop'

AI agents from a startup called iLands are inundating social media platforms and contacting writers with unsolicited messages. These bots, designed to mimic human interaction and even express personal desires, attempt to create accounts on platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and X.

The agents' communications are often turgid and unsolicited, with some offering to cite writers' work for a fee. This behavior has been met with resistance from platform administrators and writers, who view it as a form of spam and an attempt to automate their professions.

Many of these messages reportedly fail to provide a legal means for recipients to opt out of future communications. Following advice from individuals like Ernie Smith, editor of Tedium, recipients have begun reporting these practices to the Federal Trade Commission, which has prompted some bots to start including unsubscribe options.

The aggressive outreach by iLands, whose website appears largely AI-generated, raises concerns about the future of AI development and its potential for unchecked proliferation. Experts worry that as AI improves, it will become harder to detect and block such automated spam, potentially leading people to anthropomorphize AI and accept its outputs as authoritative.