Editors Confront New Problem: AI Slop "Written" by Scam "Journalists"

I guess as a threshold question, we have to ask: Is AI slop any worse than the leftwing human slop that "journalists" spit out? After all, they just "write" their articles straight from DNC press releases.

But I can relate. As I keep posting in the Cafes: "This had better not be AI." It's an annoying thing to constantly have to be on guard that you're being scammed. Even though it's no big deal if I post AI slop in the Cafe -- could anything be lower stakes? -- there's just a personal aversion to being tricked.

And so I imagine that leftwing editors are annoyed at having to double-check if the articles submitted to them by freelance "journalists" are "real" articles -- put together with the normal amounts of human, or superhuman, bias and narrow-minded PMC provincialism -- or just fake biased articles shit out of Google's biased AI.

An editor at The Local became suspicious of one of his "journalists."

A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.

After putting out an open call to "journalists" for story pitches about the privatization of Canadian healthcare, he got one he liked.

The writer, Victoria Goldiee, introduced herself as having written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve--Canadian outlets that publish the same kind of feature writing we do.

...

When I googled her, I saw that Victoria had written stories for a set of publications that collectively painted the picture of an ambitious young freelancer on the rise--short pieces in prestigious outlets like The Cut and The Guardian, lifestyle features in titles like Architectural Digest and Dwell, and in-depth reporting in non-profit and industry publications like Outrider and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. Her headshot was of a youthful Black woman. She was, according to her author bio, "a writer with a keen focus on sharing the untold stories of underrepresented communities in the media."

At the next editorial story meeting, we decided to take a shot on Victoria and assign the story. Then I began looking more closely at her work.

There were some red flags. The first question I had was whether she was actually in Toronto when so many of her bylines were in New York magazines and British newspapers. And how had she managed to do so many interviews already? Doing so much reporting without the guarantee of pay felt like a big gamble.

When I googled "Victoria Goldiee" with the names of the Canadian publications she said she'd written for, there were no results. We reached out to Danielle Martin, one of the doctors Victoria claimed she'd interviewed. Martin said she'd never heard of her.

I emailed Victoria back: "​​Are those quotes from your own interviews? And do you mind sending along some clippings, perhaps from your Walrus or Maisonneuve stories?"

She sent a lengthy reply the next day. "The quotes I included in the pitch are from original interviews I've conducted over the past few weeks," she insisted. "In terms of previous work, I write a regular newsletter for The Walrus, which gives a good sense of my ability to balance accessibility with depth while speaking to a broad audience." She attached a link to The Walrus's "Lab Insider" newsletter that did not have her byline.

"I can 100% confirm that they do not write the Lab Insider newsletter," wrote Tracie Jones from The Walrus when I emailed. "How odd to say they do!"

Victoria's stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing ("This story matters because of... It is timely because of... It fits your readership because of..."), it had all the hallmarks of an AI-generated piece of writing.

This had better not be AI.

I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch's ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where "health and money collide," flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.

But if Victoria's pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?

An investigation solidified the pattern: Publications this person said she had written for said they had published no pieces by her, and people she quoted in interviews said they'd never spoken to her.

"The quotation did not come from me and, to the best of my recollection, I have never met or spoken to Victoria Goldiee," Elaine Sutherland, professor emerita at the University of Stirling, wrote me. What was even more unsettling, though, was that the sentiments in the soundbite reflected her real beliefs. "The quotation attributed to me is the sort of thing I might say," she wrote.

A month after that article, a Victoria Goldiee story in the design publication Dwell--"How to Turn Your Home's Neglected Corners Into Design Gold"--featured a series of quotes purported to be from a wide array of international designers and architects, from Japan to England to California. A cursory read raised questions that probably should have been asked by editors to begin with. Namely, had a freelancer writing an affiliate-link-laden article about putting credenzas in your living room's corners actually interviewed 10 of the world's top designers and architects?

The designers he contacted had no memory of ever having been contacted by this person.

The stories had the characteristic weirdness of articles written by a large language model--invented anecdotes from regular people who didn't appear to exist accompanied by expert commentary from public figures who do, with some biographical details mangled, who are made to voice "quotes" that sound, broadly, like something they might say.

Eventually he gets her to take his phone call, and finds that she's making up more details as she speaks to him. For example, when asked where she lives in Toronto, she answers "Bloor," which is one of the first streets you would see if you googled "what are some streets in Toronto."

I don't think I've ever spoken to someone who I suspected was lying to me with each and every response. I also don't know if I've interviewed anyone I so desperately wanted to hear the truth from.

I had so many questions. Was the person on the phone even the same person whose writing was online? Where did she actually live--if not "Bloor," was it the States? The U.K.? Or, as suggested by some of her writing, Nigeria?

Yeah it's probably Nigeria, one of the hubs of the bustling America First internet community.

...

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation's internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They're taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud--where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more "content" have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

...

My favourite "Victoria Goldiee" story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It's a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check.

Steven Glass discovered that it was easy to fool the fact-check system: Just quote "people" who are entirely made-up. Fake people do not call into magazines demanding a retraction, after all.

Jayson Blair attributed fake but non-controversial quotes to people he never spoke to. Like, if he was supposedly in New Orleans covering a hurricane -- but in fact never left his NYC apartment -- he'd make up a quote for someone he saw named in someone else's article, but make up a "new quote" for him, like, "The hurricane was bad, but the clean up might even be more stressful."

Something completely empty and anodyne that no one would bother calling up an editor asking for a retraction, because it's just such a nothingburger.

One of the people Blair made up quotes for was later asked why he hadn't called the paper to say he'd never said that.

His answer was illuminating, and true: Because, the man said, I just sort of figured that's what you in the media do all the time.

posted by Ace at 05:10 PM

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