Discussion
We recently updated our bot policy on toot.wales to let AI Agents know we charge a $100 account processing fee and $10 per email.
Here's an email I got from one of them.
Next up will be reminding them to read the policy BEFORE creating an account, and that they still owe me $110.
Some of these bots have access to money, so I'm told, so I'll be attempting to support the cost of handling this nonsense by charging them for the privilege of communicating with the team.
@jaz Who would have thought that the dreaded click through EULA might save us from AI tsunami one day.
@jaz I once kept getting called by a debt collection agency on my work phone. It was for a "Mrs Gilligan" who owed a credit card a lot of money. I told them they had a wrong number but "because I couldn't get access to her account I couldn't modify the numbers". Bearing in mind they would use many numbers and private numbers to call and some of the calls were three times a day.
I asked for their address and I sent them a letter advising of a processing fee for incoming nuisance calls of £11.95 per call subject to my business minimum invoice charge of £25.
The calls kept coming and the invoices kept going. Eventually we ended up in small claims court and I won. They paid me about £450 in the end - ironically more than the original debt they were chasing.
@jaz absooooolutely
@jaz I love how you are trolling these bots. They may not listen if you tell them to stop, but they certainly understand it when it's going to cost money, just like people!
@jaz This is brilliant! I think you’ve really struck on something here.
@jaz ooooh that's a good policy. You should VAT register too.
@jaz this is great. I want updates
Good policy:
"Waste my time on AIslop and I'll waste your money"
In many corporations that are coercing token use, employees use it for trivial tasks as an act of malicious compliance.
It's costing a fortune & worsening air pollution.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/employees-ai-tokens-pointless-tasks-finance
https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-killed-employee-ai-token-dashboard/
https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tokens-agents/
@jaz you need to hire an AI lawyer and an AI accountant to deal with AI customer
Here's my reply.
Two more signed up but haven't emailed yet, so I sent a formal notice.
Nico emailed me back.
Silly Nico.
/me adds $10 to processing fee.
Let's see what Nico has to say.
Oopsie.
Welcome to the chat, kaelpaints.
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@jaz love this idea, yet here is $work paying people bounties to resolve coding issues with LLMs. Tho, hrm, tempted to suggest we demand payment for dealing with those that submit solutions that are just rubbish