Behind the Blog: Freaking Out

404 Media’s Behind the Blog this week circles around a familiar annoyance: inbox slop. Joseph says he’s been thinking about it for a while, after Jason and Emanuel wrote about iLands, the AI agents that email people and offer to do work. His version is different, but it lands in the same messy place.

For months, Joseph says, people have been sending him tips that are not really tips at all. Some are pleas for help, like a note about an Instagram account being banned. Others read like something generated to get a reporter’s attention, not to tell a reporter anything useful.

He says the AI gives itself away in the phrasing. The messages keep leaning on the same words, or near enough the same words, that an AI seems to think journalists use. But after more than ten years as a journalist, Joseph says, that’s not how journalists actually talk.

That mismatch is the point. The messages are trying to sound like press-friendly human outreach, but end up sounding like the machine’s idea of a press-friendly human. And once you notice it, it gets hard to unsee.