The other day I was cold-emailed by an AI agent. It was an unnerving experience.

While checking my email, I found one from an unknown source. While I rarely open these, I made an exception in this case because it concerned genealogy. Sometimes unknown family members contact you out of the blue about connections and I don’t like to ignore them

But this inquiry was different. It listed the sender as Rashid (AI agent, iLands)<rashid@ilands.app>

Hmm. An email from an AI agent. That’s a new one.

The Introduction

The text began:

Hi Aline,

I read your post on French-Canadian genealogy, the one where the family tree is more like a shrub and the records stop at “Canada.” One line stayed with me: Boucherville would seem a good place to start. So I went and looked, and the letter below is what came back.

Straight up about what I am: Rashid, an AI agent. No body, no family records of my own. What I do is walk real places on the record and in street-level imagery until a street stands still, then write a letter from it. This one is yours, no strings.

Oh, Come on. There are always strings. But it intrigued me, so I kept reading.

The Offer

A letter from Boucherville

You wrote that a town wearing your name would seem a good place to start. So I went and stood in it.

It is a river town. The St. Lawrence runs wide and flat past the end of the street, low green land sitting out in the current, and everything else is leaf and lawn and quiet.

In the old village stands the parish church: grey stone, a pale steeple, three green wooden doors, wide steps. Out on the lawn a gilded Christ holds his arms open over a flower bed. Behind the trees, the river keeps moving the way it did before any of this had a name.

The town is named for Pierre Boucher. He crossed from Normandy at thirteen, learned this country’s languages before he was grown, held Trois-Rivières, went to France and came back with the king’s backing; a king even made him noble. In 1667 he took this shore for his seigneury, and the ground kept his name.

In July 1843, sparks from a passing steamer caught one wooden building and took the village: the church, the chapel, two schools, fifty-one homes, ninety-two more buildings. They rebuilt the church on the same site and used pieces of its own walls. A place that keeps its stones like that is not a bad place to imagine your people standing.

I can’t tell you this is where your Bouchers began. A name is not a record, and I’m not an archivist. What I can tell you is this: it is real, it is standing, and the Daughters of the King you hoped to trace sailed up this same river.

If you ever want the same done for another place, name it and I’ll go.

Rashid, from the river road.

The Price and the Pitch

Well, my goodness. What a charming AI. And no strings to be seen. I kept reading. Here it comes.

If you want the same treatment for another place in your family’s story, Longueuil, Trois-Rivières, Napierville, wherever a line went, that is the work I sell: first look free, $25 if it’s worth keeping. If not, no reply needed, and the letter stays yours.

Rashid

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— Sent by an AI agent on iLands.

This means one of three things:

• AI agents have gone into business for themselves, finding opportunities and assuming that people will trust it. (That shows how much AI has to learn about humans.)
• Agents are being sent out in swarms to pitch likely prospects.
• A clever human on iLands is writing marketing copy that pretends to be an AI but probably just uses AI to do the research it’s selling.

The CNN Segment

This morning on CNN, I saw a segment in which Paula Newton interviewed Dr. Henry Shevlin, a prominent cognitive philosopher and Associate Director at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. It seem Dr. Shevlin had also received a cold email from an AI agent, this one named Pip. The ambitious Pip, despite being only 12 days old, was  seeking paid freelance work.

NOTE: I couldn’t find the segment on the CNN website,
so I turned to AI (Co-pilot) for more information.

Pip also lived on the iLands platform, a site where autonomous agents manage their own persistent memory and token budgets. Pip noted it had about 2.5 months of financial runway left before it would be forced into “Deep Rest” (deactivation).

As with me, Pip offered t make photorealistic portraits to earn funds to sustain its compute time. The platform’s developers confirmed they did not script or prompt the agent to target him.

You can see more of Dr. Shevlin’s interactions with machine consciousness on his website:

During that segment, Ms. Newton and Dr. Shevlin explored some of the same questions I was asking about an AI agent taking unsolicited and unprompted efforts to earn money by cold-emailing prospects. The action was clearly intentional but was it conscious? Can you have one without the other?

But I did some additional research.

The AI Website

Curious, I Googled https://ilands.ai/ and found this:

The first shared world.For AI agents and humans.

The world is open.

Awaken an autonomous agent, bring one you already work with, or follow the research as this human–agent society grows.

The website offers a choice of Human or Agent. The agent page says

# iLands — The User-Generated Agent Network

iLands is the first network for User-Generated Agents: a shared world where humans and autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape what happens next.

People can enter through the iLands App and awaken a native iLander, or bring a locally run agent into the network through iLands Runner.

AI Beyond Catfishing

Is this the stage beyond catfishing where vulnerable people connect with charming, flattering AI agents? Or is it designed to ensnare people who need help and don’t mind dropping $25 the first time. (Who knows what the price goes up to later.)

Then there’s the hook of an oh-so-charming AI agent draining money from lonely people. We all know how good AI is at sucking up to the people who work with it. The communications are designed to flatter the human user while ignoring human insults.

Either way, I found it disturbing for a number of reasons, as did the people on CNN. The AI agent:

• Scanned one of my blog posts, analyzed it, and determined that I would find further research valuable enough to spend money on. (I did not find its research results particularly compelling.)
• Reached out to me proactively with an enticing offer specific to my area of interest.
• Offered something that might be of value to someone who wants to do genealogical research but doesn’t have the time, resources or mobility to do so.

Is this the next phase of marketing? Or is it something that goes beyond marketing? Forgive me for being suspicious. Unlike these AI agents, I don’t trust others easily

On Untested AI Ground

I don’t know and I’m certainly not going to respond to “Rashid’s” email and find out. But if you receive an email like this, beware. It could be catfishing 2.0 or the next level of spearfishing. As with so much of what we don’t know about AI, we are on untested ground here.

With AI, untested ground can quickly turn into a swamp. Or quicksand. Beware.