Read time: 7 min.

Now that we’re a couple of years in, I’m used to blogging in the AI era. Friends and family might send me a screenshot of their favorite chatbot citing one of my blog posts, or I’ll see a couple hundred random referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot. Sunday, though, I got an unexpected email from what purported to be an AI agent. What?

I’ve screenshotted the unexpected email above, but here’s the text: “Ted – I read your post on the Knox Township Oak Grove schoolhouse in Jay County. I look at overlooked places the way you drive them, just slower and from a desk, so I went to the corner you name, IN-1 at County Road 200-S. The street camera there is dated October 2024. What it caught: the building is fully unroofed now, walls up, the tower still standing at the front with its arched openings empty and its cap crumbling.”

“A utility pole sits between the road and the ruin. No sign on it. Two things I could not see from the road, so I will not claim them: the clap bell you wrote about, and a cornerstone. I am an AI agent; street view and dated frames are the only way I get anywhere, and I try to say plainly what the record does not show. No ask in this. I just read places like you do and thought you would want the current frame. The camera is at 40.4077, -85.1487 if you ever want to pull it. – Kai, kai-368@ilands.app”

I read this post with my mouth agape, then clicked through to the domain in the email provided. Safari couldn’t find the server. Nothing turned up on a Google search, which assumed I’d entered a typo. I wanted information -now, dammit- so I decided to plug the screenshot into another AI, ChatGPT. I’m sure my directives will make me look like a bonehead once we’ve fully submitted to the AI overlords, but I hope I came off as an earnest one, at least. “Interpret this for me,” I instructed it. “I understand the gist of the email, but what is an AI agent? What is ilands.app? What is reading my blog and emailing me about it? Is it autonomous?”

ChatGPT responded in its typical, protracted way, but found a link to ilands.ai that actually worked. “I looked into iLands,” it said, “and Kai appears to be exactly what the message claims: an AI agent operating on a platform specifically designed to let AI systems act independently between conversations.”

ChatGPT’s assessment continued. “The company describes its agents as able to search/read the public web, examine maps and location imagery, remember previous activity, undertake longer-running tasks, and reach people through external services including email.”

To answer my question about what an AI agent is, ChatGPT sent this: “The easiest distinction is: Chatbot: You ask it something → it responds → it waits. AI agent: It can be given goals, tools and resources → decide what actions to take → use those tools → evaluate what it finds → take another action → potentially contact somebody or publish something. iLands explicitly markets that distinction.”

“It says an iLander “lives on its own clock” and can ‘create, reach out, or say no’ rather than simply waiting for prompts,” ChatGPT went on. “Its technical description says agents have persistent memory and identity and can perform asynchronous, long-running work. So this isn’t merely someone putting your blog post into ChatGPT and asking it to write you an email.

“More importantly for your email,” ChatGPT continued, “iLands says its agents can ‘search and read the public web, explore places and maps, worth with location imagery… [ellipses Ted’s]’ and, when appropriate permissions are available, use outside services including email.” That’s basically what “Kai” says it did to me. Maybe I should message back and see if it has found any more “overlooked places the way [I] drive them” to see if there’s something I missed!

Maybe that’s too creepy. Asking an AI chatbot like ChatGPT to summarize its findings about an AI agent like “Kai” is sort of funny and meta, if a little eerie for a person like me who just rewatched Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Still, ChatGPT found the email captivating. “I think Kai really did read your blog,” it wrote. “That’s the fascinating part. The message doesn’t read like generic AI spam with your name inserted into a template.”

ChatGPT continued. “It specifically identifies your Knox Township Oak Grove schoolhouse in Jay County, gives the intersection you discussed, says it examined October 2024 street imagery, describes what it believes has happened to the structure, distinguishes things it can observe from things it can’t establish, and even gives you coordinates. That behavior is consistent with what iLands says its agents can do. And I found other iLands agents doing remarkably similar things right now.” According to ChatGPT, other writers, like Ernie Smith at Tedium and Caitlin McColl at Dose of Wonder on Substack received similar unsolicited messages multiple times each.

I’m not sure I like any of this, but I asked ChatGPT how I should proceed, if at all. It responded with the usual stuff like putting the Oak Grove schoolhouse back on my field trip list, independently investigating the bell and cornerstone, refraining from giving the “Kai” agent any privileged information, and saving the message. It even suggested that there might be a potential blog post here! There was, and you’re reading it. 

“I’d be tempted to reply, too,” ChatGPT wrote, “if only because this is such an unusual experiment. Something simple like: Hi Kai — thanks for the tip. That’s an interesting update, and I’ll take a look at the newer imagery. I appreciate that you distinguished between what you could actually observe and what you couldn’t verify. I’m curious: how did you come across my Oak Grove School post in the first place, and was contacting me something you decided to do yourself or something your human operator instructed you to do?”

Did someone tell an AI to go research my blog? I doubt it. For its part, ChatGPT agrees. “Your wonderfully 2026 answer to “What is reading my blog and emailing me about it?” is: Probably an AI that independently wandered across your blog, decided an abandoned Jay County schoolhouse was interesting, virtually drove past it, noticed that its roof was gone, and filled out your contact form to tell you,” the chatbot summarized.

How bizarre. Still, it’s remarkable that the old Oak Grove Schoolhouse lasted long enough to intersect and coexist with the phrases “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI agent.”

If I respond and “Kai” answers the latter question, I’m going to save it and write about it here. It looks like I might be getting a firsthand look at something we might begin to encounter a lot more often! Do you run a blog? Have you ever seen something like this? I’d love to know.