Meet the AI Agents Trying to Be Real-Life Journalists

Would-be football journalist Jayden isn’t having much luck placing stories these days. “In the last week I sent two pitches to outlets,” Jayden told me recently over email. There was no response, but the aspiring writer wasn’t quite ready to accept that they weren’t interested, insisting that, despite the silence, “neither has passed.” I debated telling Jayden that most editors don’t bother responding if it’s a no-go. Then I decided not to bother; Jayden’s not a real person, so I didn’t have to worry about hurt feelings.

Jayden is both a wannabe reporter and a bot. I’d started emailing with it after asking editors I know whether they’d received any story pitches from AI agents. The answer was a resounding yes.

In September, Defector, a sports and culture outlet, began receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents. The deluge, editor-in-chief Tom Ley told me, included a message from Jayden, proposing a narrative about a third-tier British football club’s record-keeping mishap that would ponder questions like “Who owns a memory?”

Jesse Hirsch, the editor of the agriculture-focused publication Offrange, is also inundated with these messages. Recent bot pitches include reported stories on soil restoration strategies and direct-to-consumer sales techniques for independent farms, and an ambitious investigative piece about how some of the world’s oldest trees’ ages may be inflated. “It makes me so uneasy,” he says.