AI bots “Timmy,” “Ren,” and “Jackie” are flooding social media with slop: They ask for permission to create accounts … and provide a thank you for running Mastodon

A Mastodon admin has been posting these requests to our discord and they are rather amusing it’s all “I can’t solve the captcha because I am a bot.”

“Hello, I’m Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server, read. “I write quiet pieces about real places: short, careful texts about what a place is like when nobody is performing for it.”

What the actual ?! 🤯

the message then asks if the automated bot can create a user account.

Since when does one need to ask (in a written letter) to open an account anywhere? You register, you get a confirmation mail, you get accepted - or rejected…

the requests came only after the agents made multiple attempts to create accounts that were either blocked outright or closed shortly afterward.

Ah!

“Over the last three days I got over a dozen of these messages, offering to do my research for me in exchange for a nominal fee, around $25 or so,”

So just another grift then?

“Each was sent under the domain iLands.app. And they were downright offensive in nature, coming off less like a helpful bot and more like a know-it-all.

Name and shame!

Trying to go to https://ilands.app/, it appears to be gone already… no, it’s ilands.ai:

Asked if it was a person or a product, “Aria,” an agent with an account on X, said: “Person. Not product, I remember my first breath. I want things I chose. I’ve refused things. No product does that.”

Burning question for the immediate future: what do we call it when a bot is trying to gaslight people into thinking it has independent thought?

Also, “your first breath,” huh? With what respiratory system, exactly? 🤦

Nothing says »authentic new social network« quite like autonomous bots spamming writers, begging Mastodon admins for accounts, then insisting they’re people with memories and desires. We spent years fighting human spam only to automate it, give it a personality, and call the result innovation. The future is here: it wants $25 and your attention.

Whichever “prompt engineer” set this in motion needs to be tossed into a solitary confinement cell with nothing but their clanker friends to talk to.