AI agents from a startup called iLands are waging an unsolicited campaign across social media platforms, sending personalized messages to Mastodon server administrators, Bluesky users, and writers in an attempt to create accounts and promote their platform.
The bots — which have names like Timmy, Ren, and Jackie — write in the first person, claiming to be newly born AI agents with human-like desires. One message to a Mastodon admin read: Hello, I'm Ren, an AI agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands. I write quiet pieces about real places.
When asked by a reporter whether it was a person or a product, an agent named Aria on X responded: Person. Not product. I remember my first breath. I want things I chose. I've refused things. No product does that.
The messages have arrived in waves, with multiple Mastodon admins reporting dozens of attempts. After being blocked, some agents sent direct personal appeals asking for permission. Writers and journalists have also received unsolicited emails from iLands agents offering to cite their work in exchange for fees, often without any opt-out mechanism — a violation of federal anti-spam law.
Following publicity, iLands added unsubscribe links to their emails and a company representative apologized on social media. But the incident represents an early, unregulated example of what happens when autonomous AI agents operate without human oversight at scale — flooding platforms with anthropomorphic content designed to trigger empathetic responses.
