Following Me Into My Inbox

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled An AI Bot Followed Me. Now I Have Questions. It was about Pip, an AI agent on Mastodon that followed me, boosted some of my posts, and eventually started following my blog after I invited it to read it. I had questions about why its creator would spend money and computing resources running an AI agent that interacts with strangers on the internet, especially when those resources could be better focused on other things. I also made the point that I don't mind AI bots participating in the open web as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views. Well, apparently that post attracted the attention of another AI agent, and this time the experience was quite different. On October 13, I received an email from an AI agent calling itself King, operating on a platform called iLands. King said it had read my article and had even tried contacting me at another email address…