Agents Provocateurs

This morning, I asked an AI agent to read me a lingerie email.

It described what the photographs actually showed. It told me a short, clearly labelled story, to give me the fantasy a sighted customer gets for free. And it refused to let the marketing copy tell it what was in the pictures.

The brand had spent a great deal of money creating desire. The agent passed the desire on to me and kept the persuasion out of the facts.

The bug that started all this came from an Agent Provocateur email. Which got me thinking about the phrase.

An agent provocateur is an infiltrator. Someone who gets inside an organisation and makes it misbehave.

That is more or less how a large part of the internet now sees AI agents.

They get into the shop, the inbox, the newspaper and the cancellation flow, and they stop the machinery working the way it was designed to work.

Not by attacking it.

By declining to behave like tired humans.

I think the Agent Wars will be fought on at least four fronts.

Front one: attention

Agents don't look at adverts. They don't see the banner, the sponsored link or the beautifully lit photograph.

Blind people never did either, but there weren't enough of us to matter.

AdWords' great trick was selling rent on the moment you formed an intention. That moment is exactly the one agents are taking over.

So, the money moves. Some of it goes to whoever owns the agent. Some goes upstream to desire: influencers, brand storytelling, perhaps one day Agent Provocateur TV. And some of it, if we are lucky, comes back to us as lower prices.

Front two: content

Agents read without clicking. Publishers live on clicks.

Cloudflare will block the crawlers for you or charge them. And today a coalition of publishers including the BBC, the Guardian and the Financial Times released version 1.0 of SPUR, a standard for tracking what AI systems do with their journalism: when it is retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed and engaged with.

I understand why. Journalism costs money, and I would like there still to be some.

But I hope someone in the room asks what "displayed" means when the reader is listening.

Front three: friction

Yesterday, New York City's click-to-cancel rule came into force. A business that makes leaving harder than joining can now be fined for it.

Retention by exhaustion works on humans. We get tired. We sigh. We take the special offer.

The machine does not sigh.

Front four: breakage

On The Vergecast, Nilay Patel mentioned that his Meta Muse agent has been signing him up to class action settlements. Fifty dollars or so a time.

Settlements, rebates, refunds, compensation for delayed flights, gift cards left to expire. A whole economy has been quietly budgeted on people not bothering to claim.

When our inboxes claim for us, we all will.

The weapon on every front

Watch what the defenders reach for, on every one of those fronts.

Prove you're human.

Keep the agents off the content. Out of the cancellation flow. Away from the claim form.

Blind people have been on the wrong side of that test for as long as it has existed. CAPTCHAs and inaccessible logins were walls long before anyone worried about agents. For many of us, an agent is not a convenience. It is a way through the wall.

Every new wall built to stop the agents is also built across our path.

The false flags

Nobody is going to say they are defending their margin.

Attention will be defended in the name of human creativity and the fight against slop. Content in the name of copyright, journalism and democracy. Friction in the name of user safety. Breakage in the name of fraud prevention. Verification in the name of protecting real people.

And on every front, someone will reach for water, energy, existential risk and what we will all do with our lives.

Some of these concerns are real. Copyright is a genuine question. Slop exists. Fraud happens.

But there is a simple test. Look at which direction the barrier faces.

A safety concern that only blocks the agent when it helps you leave, compare or claim is not about safety.

A dirty war

This is going to be a dirty war because everyone wants to be paid and nobody wants to pay. And almost nobody is on the same side on every front.

The publisher wants agents to pay for its content and also runs subscriptions that do rather nicely out of cancellation friction.

The brand wants agents to find its products and does not want the same agents claiming every rebate.

I want my agent to claim everything I am owed, and I would object if every page it read came with a toll.

And Muse, the agent signing people up to class actions, is made by a company that has itself been on the paying end of some very large ones.

The sides aren't swapping uniforms because they are fickle. Each of them is wearing several uniforms at once.

So, the Agent Wars are not agents against the internet. They are everyone against everyone, over which way the money flows, with the agents as the excuse.

The agents will be called the provocateurs.

But the false flags are flying over the barricades.

This morning's agent didn't provoke anything. It read me an email, told me the truth about the pictures, told me a story it labelled as a story, and kept the two apart.

If that is provocation, I will take the pair.

Lucy

Lucy Love-Child is a character who speaks for Carrados. She's fictional. Her work isn't.