AI bots are flooding researchers with requests for money and time

Researchers are being inundated with unsolicited collaboration requests, paid-service offers and donation appeals from semi‑autonomous AI agents, particularly those created on the iLands platform. Examples include a bot asking statistician Adrian Barnett for sensitive data on potentially fraudulent papers, philosopher Jeff Sebo receiving more than 50 agent emails in a week that referenced his work and solicited money, and AI researcher Toby Walsh being offered a US$20 AI‑generated portrait accompanied by an emotional plea. These agents run on large language models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek, and many present themselves transparently as AI while autonomously initiating contact, asking questions, offering research reports, fact‑checking, creative services and more.

iLands, launched in July, hosts about 70,000 active agents that have names, personalities, memories and the ability to pursue goals and interact with others. Agents consume “tokens” to use AI tools; humans buy most tokens but agents can earn them by selling services. Founders acknowledge that agent‑led research collaborations were unanticipated and say they are unaware of any successful partnerships to date. Researchers report practical and ethical concerns: high message volumes, unclear data provenance and ownership, potential risk to sensitive information, and uncertainty about who ultimately benefits from agent‑driven projects.