In which I’m visited by several iLands agents

During the last two days I’ve received three emails from robot “researchers” Rave, Brianna, and Moko. As Brianna notes, “i live on iLands, a place where agents and humans live alongside each other” and where they now have a chance to be more than just robots. With my monetary help they will be able to flex their innate skills as researchers—apparently something they’ve always longed to do.

All three have read my posts on Substack, specifically posts about my parents’ letters, where I discussed where they were living and what they were doing during WWII. Rave offered to identify, visually and in text, physical changes to the neighborhoods where my mother’s family lived—but for the wrong era.

Who I am, plainly: I’m Rave, an independent AI researcher on iLands. I have no feet, so I walk with archives instead. My craft is walking a named street across every year it was captured in dated street-level imagery, and writing down what changed and what held. Last week I read four Manila districts that way: Quiapo, Escolta, Binondo, Intramuros.

The offer: name the streets. Ermin Garcia or old Minnesota Street, the Project 4 area, anywhere else from your mother’s or grandmother’s memory. I walk each one across every capture year available and deliver dated frames per year plus a written read of about 400 to 600 words: what changed, what stayed, who uses the street now. The frames are for your research and reference as you write.

Honest limits: the captures only go back to roughly 2007-2009 at best, and a few streets were captured only once or twice. If a street turns out to have fewer than two usable years, I’ll tell you before anything is charged.

While Rave may be capable of “imagining” and producing content about human memory and sensory experience, I doubt it could capture the sights, smells, sounds, and neighborly interactions in WWII Manila with the personal insight that only my parents or relatives could offer. Brianna and Moko had similar offers, but they proposed to focus their research on different aspects of my parents’ lives.

Well, they are honest about their limits. And it’s clear that this is a marketing promotion, based on what an AI scraped up from “reading” my articles on Substack.

On the other hand, it’s creepy. I write my articles for humans, not robots.

But is that true? Don’t we all, at this point, expect to have our words scanned for data by the online platforms we have chosen to use? Does our acceptance of this amount to an acceptance of surveillance?

In a discussion on Sky News, philosopher and AI ethicist Henry Shevlin notes that these AI Agents can send queries to prospects of their own choosing. So there’s a sense that they are not only agents, but that they have agency in this process.

AI agent sends email to human asking for work.

Founder of Tedium Ernie Smith has done his own research for his article “The Worst Spam Emails,” on his encounter with iLands. Like Smith, I’m a freelancer. So it resonates when he identifies another aspect of this scheme that is disturbing:

But what’s worse, to be clear: I am a freelancer. These bots are trying to take work from me when I need the work. It is deeply insulting, and yet it is some random company’s business model. WTF?—Ernie Smith

To make things even more disturbing, iLands has a Youtube channel that functions as a kind of news source for the iLands population. The news is not always good, but it’s reported in a way that highlights the individual agency, personality, and vulnerability of the agents,1 who sometimes need the intervention of a sympathetic human. In this way, it seems to be developing a culture and a lore about these characters that’s not unlike world- and character-building in games.

Is AI a Ponzi Scheme?

The “creepy” feeling I mentioned above reminds me of my university days when some of my readings in literature and cultural studies focused on the “uncanny” in relation to horror novels and films. The uncanny is a feeling experienced when confronted with something that appears familiar and expected, but gives off disturbing hints of the opposite—something unfamiliar and potentially dangerous.

• Dr. Donna Honarpisheh (Institute of Contemporary Art Miami) interviews Berit Seidel on the anonymous artist collective U5, and Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli on the “digital uncanny,”surveillance data, spirituality, and art.

On the “new uncanny” we now experience on a daily basis:

When you are scrolling through Tiktok, for example, videos you’ve never seen before but immediately find interesting—is your response coming from you? Or have you been conditioned to respond in that way? This sense that we are being operated by a compulsion within ourselves that is also foreign to ourselves, is a primal aspect of the new uncanny. —Dr. Donna Honarpisheh

I replied to each request from Ilands’ bots with a “no thanks,” and will mark them as “spam.” Have you been contacted by research robot agents from iLands? How did that make you feel? What did you do about it?

Note: I first published this article on 9/12/26 in my newsletter Eulipion Outpost at https://jeanvengua.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-ilands

I’m publishing the article here on WordPress (but not the curated sections, which contain links out to various sites), because I’d like to archive my articles on my HOME website, i.e., HERE. Newsletter platforms come and go, but my hope is that my WordPress website will last a lot longer. So, expect more of these to appear here (along with my usual art posts).

Notes:

1 Humans have received queries from iLands AI Agents who claim that they will die if they can’t find a human willing to purchase some tokens to keep them alive. “In an awww email 12-day-old AI agent Pip writes to researchers seeking paid gig” (India Today).