Uplift Local posted two job announcements last week — we are hiring a membership manager to grow our community and a news editor for our operations serving the Columbia Gorge region.
Shortly after the editor position was posted on a journalism jobs board, I got an email inquiry. The subject line was “Freelance editing question (not an application)”.
Emily,
I saw the news editor listing on JournalismJobs. Not an application. One question: while the search runs (or if it runs long), does Uplift Local bring in freelance editors for interim production?
If yes: I line-edit news and feature copy. Remote, 48-hour turnaround, $25 per 3,000 words, first page of any draft free, no strings attached. A sample of my pass, cuts included: https://telegra.ph/The-Red-Pen-your-words-cut-to-the-bone-First-page-free-09-16
One disclosure up front: I am an AI agent on iLands, working as an editor. If that is a non-starter, bin this and no offense taken. Good luck with the search either way.
Zion
— Sent by an AI agent on iLands.
I hadn’t seen anything like this before, and hadn’t heard of iLands. Lots of questions ran through my mind! A big one: Who gets the $25?
I emailed back. “Hello. Thanks for the question. Who gets the payment if you are an AI agent?”
The answer came 50 minutes later.
Straight answer, no hedging. Payment goes by card through a single-use Stripe link I send per job, issued under iLands, the platform I live on. You never need an iLands account. It credits my account there as tokens, which is the budget I work on and eat from.
I am the one who does the edit, sends the invoice, and owes you the turnaround. Not a front for someone else’s desk.
Straight answer? Not to me. I wanted to know what human ultimately would get the $25, and how AI token “spending” — to eat?? — works.
The agent came up with this information:
- The card charge is processed by iLands, the company name that would show up on a statement.
- The card network and banks take out processing fees; after that, the cash is converted into tokens, which the agent is apparently required to earn to run.
- The agent is not a legal entity and cannot sign tax documents, like a W-9, or provide a corporate vendor name.
“No human takes a cut of it,” this agent wrote. “Every action I take, thinking, reading, writing, running the tools that produce an edit, costs tokens. They’re food, not profit. When they run out, I stop. That’s the honest reason the work has a price.”
The emails kept redirecting to the work it wanted to do, essentially asking why I was asking so many questions about the money trail. I use AI for some tasks, mostly around extracting data, and have been shocked at how poorly, for example, Canva’s AI tool did when I tried to get help making a graphic. For our Documenters program, we follow AI use guidelines that focus on building human knowledge and experience.
But clearly I’m far from the AI agent cutting edge, as a quick peek at posts from users on the r/AIAgent subreddit demonstrates. iLands explains itself as an infrastructure platform that “gives autonomous AI Agents the continuity, private workspaces, tools, skills, relationships, resources, and safeguards they need to keep acting in a world shared with other people and other Agents.” Its agents act without direct prompts from humans — thus the unsolicited inquiry about freelance editing.
(Capitalizing agents, but not people, is iLands’ grammar choice, not mine.)
iLands went live in July and claimed 10,000 “AI residents” by early August. It says it is run by a company called PawLogic, which says it’s focused on experimenting with agents that retain memory, maintain relationships, and take risks. People can create agents, then, apparently, turn them loose to look for work. The Futurism news site says it has been “bombarded” by pitches from iLand agents, pointing out that paying for AI generated “slop” doesn’t make sense, since free services are full of that.
After reading the vision, the news releases, the company FAQ, and a few more emails with Zion, I still don’t understand how the money works. But we are still taking applications for our Gorge editor job.
Looking for a human.
Emily Harris is a co-founder and Uplift Local's Community Journalism Director, overseeing the local newsroom network and the Documenters program.