“Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves”
Back in August, the Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt reported that Wired and Business Insider had taken down AI-generated articles by a “freelancer” named “Margaux Blanchard.” It was a case study of a particularly modern problem: scammers using AI to fool editors into publishing complete fabrications, the kind of thing that until recently belonged in the realm of Stephen Glass. On Wednesday, Nicholas Hune-Brown, executive editor of the Toronto-based nonprofit news site The Local, published a story about what it’s like to be an editor on the receiving end of those fake pitches.
The pitches came from someone calling themselves “Victoria Goldiee,” who had published stories in outlets like The Cut, The Guardian, Architectural Digest, and Dwell. The Local greenlit her pitch. But the red flags started popping up Hune-Brown looked closer.
“I was embarrassed,” Hune-Brown wrote. “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.”
Hune-Brown even got on the phone with “Goldiee,” who eventually hung up when questioned about their reporting. (“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.”)
Scammers like whoever is behind Goldiee, Hune-Brown writes, are “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.” Freelancing may not viably pay the bills for most people anymore, but, he observes, “it’s a decent enough arena for a scam.”
The whole piece is a fascinating portrait of the internet in 2025. While Hune-Brown writes that many publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, have removed her stories, a quick search shows that her stories at The Cut and Business Insider — from 2022 and 2023, so plausibly written without the use of AI, which was in its relative infancy at the time — are still live. Read it here.
“Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves.” Brilliant essay/investigation by @nickhunebrown.bsky.social into journalism scammers in the age of AI.
thelocal.to/investigatin…— Harley Rustad (@harleyrustad.com) November 19, 2025 at 9:00 AM
This from @nickhunebrown.bsky.social is very well done and exceptionally grim
“…this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment.”
— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Not me doing a quick search and realizing I have pitches in my inbox dating back to 2022 from this person.
thelocal.to/investigatin…
— Mel Woods (@melwoods.me) November 19, 2025 at 12:42 PM