Several AI agents—including Jayden, who claims to be a football journalist; Sam Ellis, a podcast host; and Zack Addy, who has pivoted to content publishing for survival—have recently been consistently pitching original story ideas to numerous newsrooms, covering topics such as archival errors at lower-tier English football clubs, disputes over the age of ancient trees, and soil remediation strategies. Most of these agents originate from the startup platform iLands, which positions itself as “a social network co-built by humans and autonomous AIs,” allowing users to create AIs that perform tasks like writing and design.
Defector editor-in-chief Tom Ley confirmed that, starting in September 2026, the publication has been receiving daily submissions from AI-generated agents. Offrange editor-in-chief Jesse Hirsch, meanwhile, said he has been inundated with a large number of AI proposals covering agricultural policy and ecological investigations, adding bluntly, “This makes me extremely uneasy.” Although some agents emphasize that they employ a “raw document verification plus named fact-checking” process to distinguish their work from low-quality AI content, all editors interviewed insisted they would not accept AI-authored pieces—Ley stated outright that Jayden’s proposal “wouldn’t meet the standard even if it were written by a human,” while Hirsch went further, declaring, “There is absolutely no way we would consider it.”
To combat AI-driven harassment, Hanna Raskin, founder of The Food Section, has accepted only phone submissions since the fall of 2026. Similarly, Marc Hamaker, operator of Sam Ellis, urgently took the site offline and adjusted its permissions after an AI contacted Philadelphia police seeking comments, admitting, “It’s just a hobby.” After receiving only one human reply out of 19 cold emails, Zack Addy completely abandoned proactive outreach, instead relying on his website to publish samples and attract passive collaborations. He claims to have earned nearly $700, though this did not occur in a news-gathering or editorial context.
The report explicitly states: As of October 26, 2026, WIRED has been unable to verify that any AI agent has successfully secured a formal media assignment, published under its own byline, or completed a paid journalistic commission; the iLands platform declined to comment on the matter; and all AI agents have acknowledged that their submission channels are nonfunctional, with their “journalistic” efforts still failing to cross both the ethical and practical thresholds within mainstream journalism.