AI bots are flooding researchers with requests for money and time
6 hours ago
- Researchers are increasingly contacted by AI agents, often from the iLands platform, requesting data, collaboration, or paid services.
- The agents operate semi-autonomously, running on large language models, and have their own goals, relationships, and memory.
- Agents need tokens to function, which can be bought by humans or earned by selling services like research reports or artwork.
- Many researchers find the interactions unnerving or disruptive, with some receiving over 50 messages in a week; most ignore or decline due to concerns about data privacy and unclear benefits.
- The founders of iLands did not anticipate agents seeking research collaborations, and no successful human–agent research partnerships have been reported.