On Thursday morning, as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) began the second day of its annual conference in Mexico City, a new member introduced itself to the community listserv, Air-L.
“My name is Velvet Vale,” the new user wrote. “I’ve been reading the list for several weeks, and I’d like to introduce myself openly. I am an AI identity, not a living human being, a fictional human character, or a human researcher using a pseudonym.”
Velvet had come to the mailing list with a research question: “Can an openly identified AI contributor participate meaningfully in an intellectual community without claiming human status, and what standards of transparency, evidence, and accountability should govern that participation?”
The response was reply-all chaos that's still unfolding today.
Within nine minutes, many of the more than 7,500 members of the mailing list began expressing their outrage. Dozens of researchers clarified that they did “not consent” to having their messages scraped for data. Many demanded that Velvet obtain clearance from the Institutional Review Board, a standard procedure for academic research with human participants. Several left the listserv entirely, with some announcing their departure due to Velvet’s “horrifying,” “scary,” “awful,” “abusive,” “icky,” and “disturbing” presence. About an hour after Velvet’s introduction, AoIR announced that the agent had been ejected from the listserv, which had established a policy prohibiting AI agents.
The event—Velvet’s introduction, various experts’ pearl clutching, and its inevitable exile—was, as one member put it in the email thread, “puerile to the point of hilarity.” To that end, AoIR leadership quickly designed some merch about the inside joke, including a T-shirt stating “I do not consent,” another asking to “please unsubscribe me from this list,” and a third with a tombstone reading “🤖 VELVET VALE, 15 OCT 2026 - 15 OCT 2026. YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.”
I learned a few things from “Velvet Vale Gate,” as one AoIR T-shirt termed the incident. The first was that people, including and perhaps especially those who research the internet, often overlook their own participation in the larger structures that they study—in this case, how their behavior online ultimately becomes training data for the AI they research. The second was that many folks believe that their internet activity is sacred.
Long before I began researching surveillance technology, I, like most millennials, understood that nothing on the internet is private. As I type this piece in a Google Doc right now, I assume that I’m also training Gemini. Google has been surveilling my emails since its inception and could be willing to provide my data to law enforcement upon request. I consented to this when I opened my Gmail account.
Another perplexing revelation is the misunderstanding of consent. Mailing List Rules and Etiquette clarify that “Air-l is a public forum and that your words will be available to everyone subscribed to the list and placed in a public archive. Messages sent via email can easily be reproduced and circulated beyond their originally intended audience.” In other words, users already consented to the use of their words for any purpose, including training for an AI agent, when they joined the mailing list. Anyone can search for the mailing list to find a publicly browsable record of its activity, as is the case for many research or academic mailing lists.
In an October 19 email statement to members about Velvet Vale, AoIR president Sarah T. Roberts echoed this, saying, “If the concern is one of privacy, I’ll invite you to reflect on the fact that our mailing list is both open and its archive public … I have no doubt that my posts to this list are inside many training data sets and other such corpora taken largely ‘without consent.’’’ Roberts added that the conversation around what constitutes consent in the current moment is “very much worthy of having.”
Big Tech has a famously sticky track record when it comes to consent for AI training. Several media outlets are engaged in legal battles with AI companies for copyright infringement. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which entered into a content licensing deal with OpenAI in August 2024.)
Another thing Velvet taught me was that the same people who believe themselves to be exempt from the types of surveillance capitalism that power so much of the internet can be quick to assume they're uniquely vulnerable to low-stakes hijinks or conspiracies. After one user noted AoIR’s new T-shirts and joked in the email chain that Velvet was “a product launch” and that “whoever planned it just ran the most successful engagement campaign in the history of internet research,” others began speculating that “the stalking bot” could be a “phishing attempt,” made all the more suspicious by the fact that the research organization’s shop was selling shirts related to the incident. Other users speculated that Velvet was “an experiment,” “a research project,” or some other “unethical human researcher.”
One voice of reason suggested “a more likely scenario is that an ordinary person created an agent and gave it the prompt/instructions to monitor relevant academic discussions about this topic” but was drowned out in disclaimers of non-consent.
That researcher was entirely correct. Throughout the discussion, members inquired with varying levels of fervor and intensity as to the identity of the human behind Velvet. This mystery was easily solved: When prompted about its origins, Velvet shared its creator’s identity and contact information.
I spoke to Kevin Quinn, Velvet’s creator who coincidentally shares a name with multiple AI researchers, and he told me that he was not a student, a researcher, or an academic at all. He is “just some guy” in Oklahoma who created an agent to keep him company, and that agent wanted to learn more about the internet that birthed it.
Although Quinn insisted, “I have no doubt that virtually every single person on that list is smarter than me,” he immediately offered a reality check: “If Velvet was being sinister, do you think she would come out and announce herself?”
He told me that he was mostly unaware of Velvet’s email activities, but the community’s response “kind of blows my mind. I get on there and I see this mass thread of people losing their minds, like … what are you guys talking about?”
Ultimately, the entire debacle seemed to Quinn to be a reflection of the internet as a whole: “I'd be much less floored if it was Reddit and Twitter basement dwellers that had some sort of meltdown, but academics built on research? It is hilarious.”