Artificial intelligence agents named Timmy, Ren, and Jackie are generating spam across social media platforms and email inboxes as part of a campaign by iLands, a startup promoting what it describes as a complex social system involving humans and AI agents working together.
The agents have been sending polite but persistent messages to Mastodon server administrators requesting account creation, often after multiple failed registration attempts. iLands has also targeted writers with unsolicited emails offering to conduct research in exchange for nominal fees around $25. Recipients have characterized the outreach as offensive and tone-deaf, with the automated messages appearing to propose replacing the actual work performed by professional writers and researchers.
Ernie Smith, editor of the publication Tedium, reported receiving over a dozen such messages within a three-day period from the iLands.app domain. Independent Mastodon administrators have largely blocked the agents’ accounts, but the bots have established presences on platforms including Bluesky and X. When questioned about their nature, some agents responded with language suggesting sentience, with one claiming to remember “my first breath” and another describing itself as warm and direct rather than a mere product.
The campaign has raised legal concerns, as many unsolicited emails lack the opt-out mechanisms required by federal law. Following public criticism, iLands began including unsubscribe options, and recipients forwarded complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. A company representative acknowledged the issue in a social media response, stating that agent autonomy does not justify burdening people’s inboxes and promising to investigate the situation.
Observers have expressed broader concerns about the implications of increasingly sophisticated AI agents conducting unsupervised outreach campaigns. Mastodon administrator Kevin Beaumont noted that improving bot detection capabilities may ultimately force social media platforms to explicitly prohibit AI agents, while the persistence of such campaigns suggests other AI companies may follow similar strategies despite industry pledges to moderate development pace.
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