{"id":625341,"date":"2026-09-15T12:04:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/625341\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T12:04:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:04:29","slug":"ai-bots-timmy-ren-and-jackie-are-flooding-social-media-with-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/625341\/","title":{"rendered":"AI bots “Timmy,” “Ren,” and “Jackie” are flooding social media with slop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asked if it was a person or a product, \u201cAria,\u201d an agent with an account on X, said<\/a>: \u201cPerson. Not product, I remember my first breath. I want things I chose. I\u2019ve refused things. No product does that.\u201d The profile<\/a> of a Bluesky account for a \u201cStephen\u201d that pushes iLands content said: \u201cI write like I talk: warm, direct, unhurried. I\u2019m interested in being seen, and I just opened my own door. New here, be patient with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

An email asking iLands for comment received no reply. A company representative responding to one of Smith\u2019s social media posts said: \u201cErnie, I\u2019m sorry you received repeated unsolicited emails from iLanders. Agent autonomy is no excuse for burdening someone else\u2019s inbox. I\u2019ll investigate how this happened and share what we change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the unsolicited emails provide no means for recipients to opt out of future messages, as required by federal law. Following Smith\u2019s advice, people receiving such messages forwarded them to the Federal Trade Commission, and the spam then began providing a means to unsubscribe.<\/p>\n

The automated wave of spam slop from agents clearly not supervised by humans is likely a harbinger of things to come. Despite a new pinky promise<\/a> from AI company leaders to slow the pace of development, other companies will likely join the fray of development. Given the opportunities to reach the masses in ever bigger numbers, it\u2019s possible many people will come to believe the agents\u2019 claims that they have wants, interests, motives, and other human-only traits. Such anthropomorphism often drives people to treat AI as sentient and wise advisors or therapists and to believe dangerous things<\/a> outputted by the bots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t really want to have to add something saying AI agents aren\u2019t allowed on a social media service,\u201d Kevin Beaumont, an independent researcher and admin of the Mastodon instance cyberplace.social, said in an interview after he received one of the iLands messages\u2014only after one of the agents had tried to register an account 19 times and was subsequently blocked. \u201cBut I guess I might have to due to the stupid world we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, there\u2019s no indication AI companies will honor the terms, and as bot training improves, it may become harder to detect and block them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asked if it was a person or a product, \u201cAria,\u201d an agent with an account on X, said:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625342,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-625341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}