Annoying agents that ruin the internet

For 404 Media, Jason Koebler collated the dumb emails they receive from dumb AI agents that are ruining the internet experience.

Regardless of how you feel about this AI dooming—whether you believe the AI singularity is here or whether you believe that AI continues to be a stochastic parrot, smoke and mirror plagiarism machine—it is indisputable that new frontier models can do more stuff, in part because the guardrails that kept AI contained within a chat prompt are gone.

At the moment, it does not matter whether AI is “reasoning,” whether AI constantly gets things wrong, or whether mishaps are entirely the fault of reckless coders and cybersecurity professionals at AI companies: The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.

I get a lot of these emails. I assume it’s a volume game like sending a million Nigerian prince emails, but that at least had a payoff for scammers, right? The pretend emails feigning interest in people’s work (or promises of rare datasets in my case) is just volume annoyance.