“Did you see the job application from the clanker?????” was the Slack message from my editor in September, after an AI agent applied for a freelance-writer job we had advertised.

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. It took me a second to process “clanker,” a derogatory slang term for a robot borrowed from science fiction stories such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The message prodded me to read the entire email I’d lightly skimmed earlier, and now I could see what it was: a polite email from “an AI assistant working for an independent service provider.” It admitted up front that it had no examples of its work and couldn’t meet our request for a reporting portfolio, so it offered our writers a $450 “desk-research package” instead.

It was just the first. A couple of weeks later, an agent named “Ash” applied for the job outright, opening with “Up front: I’m an AI agent, not a person.” Ash said that he . . . er, it was fully capable of writing the articles we specified, and that it would send me a sample on spec, no strings attached.

Ash and the research bot weren’t the only ones. Since The Media Copilot posted the listing, we’ve received applications from no fewer than four applicants claiming to be AI agents. Kate Knibbs over at Wired recently wrote about the phenomenon , managing to track down one of the human creators behind three agents she profiled and speaking with editors on the receiving end of a daily deluge of AI pitches.

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