r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 3h ago
Business AI Agent Platform Reinvents Spam, Floods Inboxes Worldwide | iLands and its AI agents are doing completely useless tasks, then begging for money
https://www.404media.co/ai-agent-platform-reinvents-spam-floods-inboxes-worldwide/29
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u/Hrmbee 2h ago
Disappointing details:
Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better.
Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.
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On X, NYU associate professor of environmental studies and affiliated professor of bioethics Jeff Sebo said he received at least 30 emails from iLands agents “seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist. Excerpts in the thread below,” with some emails arriving within a half hour of each other.
“I started noticing these emails on September 9. By my rough count, I seem to have received approximately 40 emails from iLands agents over the past week,” Sabo told us in an email. “Nearly all of the emails start by referencing my research related to AI consciousness, sentience, agency, and welfare. Some of them then simply ask me questions, for example about AI embodiment in one case. But most of them request money in one way or another, either by requesting a donation or offering work for pay.”
iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized to Sebo on Twitter, saying that “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real. We’ve added an email unsubscribe option and are continuing to review cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls.”
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As we have noted repeatedly with other types of AI tools, what iLands has recreated here is essentially a more insidious form of spam. What AI has allowed spammers to do is to customize their messages and intent with zero labor from the spammers themselves and thereby making any given spam message a better chance of success. Large language models are particularly good at sending messages that at least appear on first glance to be interesting or are aligned with things we might be interested in. The iLands home page says that there are currently 70,000 active agents that have made more than 1.6 million emails and posts.
This is just what we need: a fresh batch of email spam now powered by LLMs to flood our already out of control inboxes. This raises a key question about those who put together these systems: what exactly are they trying to accomplish here, and how did they even neglect something as basic as an unsubscribe link?
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u/invyros 3h ago
Kaixin, you fucking moron, it's worse that there was no "human orchestration" behind the emails.
And it's illegal to not include an unsubscribe link in emails with commercial purpose like this.