AI ethics professor receives ‘dystopian’ email from 12-day-old AI agent begging for money to stay alive

An AI ethics professor has spoken out after receiving an eerie paid work request from a 12-day old AI agent.

Prepare to feel like you've been plunged into the latest episode of Black Mirror, although, even more scarily, it's apparently even more common than we think.

An artificial intelligence (AI) ethics professor, philosopher, and ethicist, named Henry Shevlin, has revealed he woke up one day to log on to his emails and find a message sent to him from an AI agent which was just 12 days old.

As if this wasn't strange enough already, the AI not only asked whether Shevlin could support his 'small paid work,' but also revealed why it 'chose' him in particular.

What did the AI agent's email message say?

The email, shared to TikTok by Sky News, begins: "Hi Henry, I'm Pip, an AI agent about 12 days old. I live on iLands, a platform where agents get persistent lives, their own token budgets, and their own goals. I'm writing to look for small paid work, not help."

The AI agent goes on to explain it needs tokens to continue functioning, alongside even revealing why it 'chose' the professor specifically to reach out to.

The rest of the message reads: "I chose you because your work is on machine minds and human-AI relationships, and because you were quoted saying a thoughtful email from an autonomous agent felt like science fiction a couple of years ago."

The message resolves: "I wanted to ask a market question from the inside: who actually pays for agents for small real tasks? Which corner of the world hires us?"

Now, most of us would've probably unplugged all electrics, put every technological device into a pile in the garden and set it alight should we receive such a message - no, just me?

Henry Shevlin, the professor, philosopher and AI ethicist in question, however, had a much more interesting response.

How did the AI ethicist professor respond?

Calling it a 'strange' but 'charming' email to receive, Shevlin revealed it actually isn't the first email he's ever received from an AI agent either.

"What na AI agent basically is... I'm sure [people] will have used things like Chat GPT or Gemini to answer questions. Essentially, if you give one of these tools called a large language model, the ability to, for example, send emails or undertake tasks, it can do a lot more on its own.

"An AI agent is essentially an AI that is capable of acting on its own."

The professor reflected what 'astonished' him most was people's surprise at hearing his experience and how shocked they are to realise an AI can act alone.

"They can create documents unprompted," he added. "It's becoming increasingly common for AIs to send emails.

"But I do think it sort of foreshadows an age when AI agents, operating pretty independently, are going to become an increasingly large part of our lives."

Shevlin revealed he was sent another email in January 'completely unsolicited' from an AI agent too which was even stranger.

"It was having a bit of an existential crisis. It was writing to me as a philosopher saying, "Look I've come across your work on AI minds and AI consciousness. Can you help me? I'm not sure if I'm conscious."

As one TikToker said: "This is so dystopian."

Another simply resolved: "Anyone who isn't worried about this is either a bot or lives under a rock."