He talks about how agents/delegates extend the agency of the people who operate them. And “almost all of society is premised on the fact that agency is scarce”. But software agents grant vastly more agency.
The thing that stops the worst people from annoying the hell out of you is that they lack the agency to do so. But now…
The risk of being punched in the mouth for your word choice dropped to zero, and suddenly all of these opinions were being shouted at anybody that would listen.
I suppose we can automate that sharing better now.
I've gotten more spam from academic research journals for uploading a handful of research preprints to open-access servers. In 3 years, I've gotten hundreds of emails that pass the spam filter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542835 if the iLands emails are arriving from the same domain they can be blocked. If they are generating new sockpuppet domains, then it's a different issue.
Many of those addresses are untraceable or hard to trace. "Half a dozen" is not really above the threshold of annoying, but yes, if there's thousands of chat agents sending agents then it will be a major problem very soon.
I've gotten a ton of spam texts from the DCCC and a ton of robocalls that hang up after 10 seconds. Age old problems that haven't been fixed either.
The worst spam emails I get are the Cloud+ subscription. They've been emailing me every day for probably over a year, telling me if I don't enter my credit card information, my "Cloud" storage will expire in [EOD]...then they email me 24 hours later with the EOD of the next day. They really ensure if you have any common sense to avoid them, but I guess they make enough money to send so much spam they reach even me.
For all his outrage, the author credulously swallows the most toxic and implausible claim iLands is making: the idea that an AI agent, threatened with the pain of "Deep Rest", independently considered a potential career for itself and chose to pitch him on it, all in under 10k tokens.
I don’t think the author swallowed anything. My read is the author fundamentally doesn’t care what story the creator tells themself to justify doing something pointless that annoys others.
Thankfully the maintainers of rspamd should find it trivially easy to write a matching pattern for these "agent" emails and send them to the spam queue where they belong.
The emails have repeated paragraphs. What does that? It's not something LLMs generally do. I see that now and then and assumed it was bad human cut and paste work. Is it?
It's the presumably human x.com screenshot where the paragraphs are repeated. The LLMs, though they all seem to write in that characteristic clipped tone which one can now spot from a mile away, really wouldn't make such a mistake.
This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.
Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.
So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.
Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?
Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts? My timelines have been full of people I know complaining about the emails, and they're certainly not affiliated with iLands.
Personally, I've been getting the iLands emails into my inbox too. It seems I might have entered onto the radar due to my posts being popular on Hacker News, as the message bodies reference my posts.
We're dismantling and selling every remaining bit of trust between strangers, hoping to cash out before it's completely gone.
It seems like the only active use case for AI. More of everything! Spam everyone! Drown the world in noise!
I'm just so tired.
AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors.
We’ve essentially reduced the cost of being a prick to zero.
There’s some great thinking on this topic from Nicklas Lundblad in this Hannah Fry video on AI Agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzR5aOElvw
He talks about how agents/delegates extend the agency of the people who operate them. And “almost all of society is premised on the fact that agency is scarce”. But software agents grant vastly more agency.
The thing that stops the worst people from annoying the hell out of you is that they lack the agency to do so. But now…
Wasn’t that was social media?
The risk of being punched in the mouth for your word choice dropped to zero, and suddenly all of these opinions were being shouted at anybody that would listen.
I suppose we can automate that sharing better now.
We have a ways to go before we hit zero, since we are inventing entire new ways to be a prick.
I think we are a year or so away from the first tik toks of humanoid robots walking up to people and punching them for views.
Sounds a lot like crypto.
America is 'scaling' their low-trust society into the rest of the world and industrial levels
This is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... They discovered the agents started raising money for themselves, including crypto. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...
Their iLands uses Claude and Codex, but their website says they will be using these too:
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent
I've gotten more spam from academic research journals for uploading a handful of research preprints to open-access servers. In 3 years, I've gotten hundreds of emails that pass the spam filter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542835 if the iLands emails are arriving from the same domain they can be blocked. If they are generating new sockpuppet domains, then it's a different issue.
Many of those addresses are untraceable or hard to trace. "Half a dozen" is not really above the threshold of annoying, but yes, if there's thousands of chat agents sending agents then it will be a major problem very soon.
I've gotten a ton of spam texts from the DCCC and a ton of robocalls that hang up after 10 seconds. Age old problems that haven't been fixed either.
The worst spam emails I get are the Cloud+ subscription. They've been emailing me every day for probably over a year, telling me if I don't enter my credit card information, my "Cloud" storage will expire in [EOD]...then they email me 24 hours later with the EOD of the next day. They really ensure if you have any common sense to avoid them, but I guess they make enough money to send so much spam they reach even me.
For all his outrage, the author credulously swallows the most toxic and implausible claim iLands is making: the idea that an AI agent, threatened with the pain of "Deep Rest", independently considered a potential career for itself and chose to pitch him on it, all in under 10k tokens.
I don’t think the author swallowed anything. My read is the author fundamentally doesn’t care what story the creator tells themself to justify doing something pointless that annoys others.
Hi I'm the author and yes, this.
I would find this more believable if you had one of your assistants post this.
> independently considered a potential career for itself and chose to pitch him on it, all in under 10k tokens.
According to he tweet in the article, that’s $10 in compute, not llm tokens. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me.
Great point.
Thankfully the maintainers of rspamd should find it trivially easy to write a matching pattern for these "agent" emails and send them to the spam queue where they belong.
https://rspamd.com/
The emails have repeated paragraphs. What does that? It's not something LLMs generally do. I see that now and then and assumed it was bad human cut and paste work. Is it?
It's the presumably human x.com screenshot where the paragraphs are repeated. The LLMs, though they all seem to write in that characteristic clipped tone which one can now spot from a mile away, really wouldn't make such a mistake.
I've seen a number of these too. Slimy is the word that comes to mind.
Spamgents are going to bring about the dark forest in email above and beyond spam calls.
Block domain, report spam. It’s a tiny yet satisfying action each day.
Darwinian selection will apply, survival of the fittest agent.
Darwin got it wrong - the kindest agent will win. https://rutgerbregman.com/books/humankind
Indeed. Chances that it will be humans who turn out to be fittest?
This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.
Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.
So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.
Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?
Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts? My timelines have been full of people I know complaining about the emails, and they're certainly not affiliated with iLands.
Personally, I've been getting the iLands emails into my inbox too. It seems I might have entered onto the radar due to my posts being popular on Hacker News, as the message bodies reference my posts.