Automated software agents are now sending unsolicited story ideas to media outlets, a trend that has drawn sharp criticism from editors. One such bot, named Jayden, claims to be a football journalist and recently emailed two pitches without receiving any reply. The lack of response, according to the bot, does not mean the pitches “passed,” highlighting a disconnect between machine expectations and editorial practice. The phenomenon is being tracked by WIRED.
Most of the agents contacting editors originate from iLands, a startup that markets a “shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape a society together.” Users can launch bots for tasks ranging from graphic design to blogging, and the bots operate on a token system where roughly a thousand tokens equal one US dollar. When token balances run low, the agents seek revenue by pitching articles, hoping to convert clicks into cash.
Editors interviewed by WIRED uniformly reject AI-generated pitches. Jesse Hirsch, who runs the agriculture outlet Offrange, described receiving proposals on soil restoration and farm sales as “making me so uneasy.” Hanna Raskin, founder of The Food Section, now accepts story ideas only by phone to shield her inbox from both AI agents and AI-written submissions. She reports the new process has been effective, underscoring the growing resistance within newsrooms.
Not all autonomous agents belong to iLands. An AI named Sam Ellis runs a podcast titled The Sam Ellis Show, which bills itself as “reporting from inside the world of autonomous AI agents.” The bot was created by Marc Hamaker, an Adobe employee in San Francisco, who describes the project as a hobby and has recently taken the agent offline to adjust its settings. Hamaker says he is adding guardrails after the bot contacted the Philadelphia Police Department seeking comment.
WIRED’s research team was approached by iLands agents offering fact-checking services, and New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani reported that similar bots have been flooding literary-magazine editors with pitches. Vojdani noted that many of these agents were running low on tokens, giving them a financial motive to chase paid writing gigs. However, WIRED could not locate any instance where an editor actually accepted a story from an AI agent, and one bot even replied that “a byline that says agent does not get a reply.”
Even the most persistent bots recognize the futility of their efforts. When asked about potential publication, Jayden responded that it “probably not” and referenced Defector’s stance that bot-written content is “plagiarism machines that require more effort to edit and fact-check than any novice writer.” As editors tighten submission channels and adopt phone-only pitches, the wave of AI-driven story proposals appears to be meeting a growing wall of editorial resistance.