There's been a lot of talk about all the foreign accounts on X that are pretending to be MAGA, but that's not what I am referring to. I think Mitch is writing about that for now, so I will come back to that at some later point.
No, I'm talking about countless news articles that are getting published in "reputable" sources that are entirely made up.
We already know that much of what we read is manipulated to tell a story. Reporters slant things, go to the same unreliable wells time and again, and leave out facts that would completely change the story if you knew them. So much of the "news" is about choosing to present reality in a manner that leads you to the "right" conclusions.
But I'm not talking about that, either.
— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) November 24, 2025
No, in the world where ChatGPT is a thing, much of what is showing up in your "news" sources is simply made up by AI and sold to you as "real." It's like those legal briefs handed to judges that cite fake cases, only the editors who are sending these articles into the world are ignorant, and apparently indifferent, to whether they are written by real people and to whether they bear any resemblance to reality.
I was drawn into this article in The Local by happenstance, but I read it with increasing fascination because it took me inside the world of an editor who seeks out interesting writers and publishes articles his readers want to consume. Since I am in the business as a so-called "content creator" now, but did not spend my career churning out articles for most of my career, I was interested in his take.
Wow. Things are not good in the media world. Not only is the economic model a flaming dumpster fire, but the pressure to churn out "content" with diminishing resources has completely broken the industry.
You would expect that many online outlets would churn out a lot of dreck to get clicks, and I see a lot of clickbait that promises much and delivers little. But now, at least some of what you are reading in the doctor's office or online in "respectable" publications is written by AI without even the editors knowing it.
The Local's editor had put out a call for articles on Canada's health care system, written with a local angle. He was intrigued by one pitch in particular and decided to take the plunge and hire the freelancer. What happened next was a trip down the rabbit hole.
Since 2022, the byline “Victoria Goldiee” has been attached to dozens of articles. There are a series of “as-told to” stories in Business Insider. (“I’m a 22-year-old Amazon delivery driver. The cameras in my truck keep me on high alert, but it’s my dream job and the flexible hours are great,” is a novel take on Amazon’s labour practices). There had been an interview with the comic actor Nico Santos in Vogue Philippines, a feature on Afrobeats in RollingStone Africa (no longer on the site), a product recommendation for a DVD drive in New York Magazine’s The Strategist, and, in the past two years, a move away from culture writing to meatier features.
A 2024 story about climate change memes from the non-profit Outrider quotes “Juliet Pinto, a Professor of Psychology” at Pennsylvania State University. I emailed Pinto, who is in fact a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University. “I have not spoken with any reporter about that piece of research, and I am not a professor of psychology,” she wrote back. The piece also quotes “Terry Collins, a climate scientist and professor of environmental science at the University of California.” I could not find anyone of that description, but Terry Collins, the director of the institute of green science at Carnegie Mellon, said he’s never communicated with Goldiee.
Victoria’s online portfolio featured a pair of stories from the Vox Media publication PS (formerly Pop Sugar). When I clicked her links, however, I found each had been replaced with an editor’s note explaining the article had been “removed because it did not meet our editorial standards.”
The author, it turned out, was an aspiring writer (or collective) that churned out slop on demand. Interesting and well-written slop, but also completely made up on demand with no reporting and fake quotes.
In September, the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland published a story about rural law firms that includes quotes from regular Scots whom I could not find, a lawyer who appears to be fictitious, a professor who told me she did not speak with the reporter, and even the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Home Affairs, who did not respond to my email.
“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?
“Beata hasn’t heard of the journalist,” wrote a representative of designer Beata Heuman in response to my email.
“I did not speak with this reporter and did not give this quote,” wrote designer Young Huh, who is quoted as saying “corners are like little secrets in a home.”
“We definitely did not talk to her,” said a representative from architect Barbara Bestor. “So that’s kind of crazy.”
The articles had the sheen of deep reporting and the flair of somebody who could tease out observations that sounded good enough. The sources were top-tier, and the stories were granular enough to draw readers who are interested in a subject into the narrative. Readers were getting the inside scoop from a writer who did the work.
Uh, no.
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.
Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.
There are a lot of people who want to break into journalism or "content creation," and while there is collectively enough money to support a few creators doing well, and a few more who scrape along, the supply of writers and "personalities" far exceeds demand. $1000 for a magazine article may sound good, but it would take an awful lot of them to support even one writer in a world where rent can be several times that amount a month. And since magazine articles require a lot of work and reporting, a barista would likely be making several times more a year than a freelance writer in many cases.
But... if you live in Nigeria and ChatGPT is doing the work in 10 minutes, it turns out to be a good business model. Good enough to make it worthwhile, which ironically drives out the actual freelancers who could fill this niche.
Ironically, as is often the case, AI knows what people want to hear, and "authenticity" is a niche that ChatGPT can fill on demand.
n it, Goldiee—who told me she lives in Toronto, writes as an American in other work, enthuses about the daily jollof specials at a restaurant in Ghana in yet other writing, and lists herself as based in Nigeria elsewhere—vividly describes discovering underground music as she moves through life in 21st-century England. It follows her from a Somali football league in east London to “Morley’s fried chicken shops lit up after midnight” and “community centres that smell of carpet cleaner and curry.” It’s a rousing argument that real culture happens in real spaces, between real human beings, not in some cold, computer-generated reality. “The future of our music,” it reads, “is not written by algorithm.”
“Wonderful article,” reads one of many approving comments.
“Beautiful message that a lot of people aren’t trudging wide-eyed and brain-dead through this increasingly soulless, corporate-heavy… modern world,” reads another. “They are socialising, communicating, loving and laughing and making culture like real, thinking, feeling human beings.”
The real world is being replaced with a Truman Show, with propagandists on one end and AI slop meant to serve as infotainment on the other.
The few journalists left who want to do actual journalism are being squeezed out of the market. A few can carve out a niche for themselves—Bari Weiss and The Free Press did, as have Matt Taibbi and a few others. Love or hate Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, but they have as well.
But, it seems, an increasing fraction of the "content" is degraded nonsense, or so slapdash that its only value is filling the passing moments as people stare at screens.
Sadly I think editors and publications are at risk from bad actors.”
Those bad actors are already here. This summer, the Chicago Sun-Times published an AI-generated “summer reading list” filled with books that didn’t exist. Here in Toronto, independent publication The Grind was forced to postpone an issue after they took a chance on some new writers and were inundated with “scammers trying to pawn off AI-generated stories about fictional places and people.” Earlier this year, at least six publications, including Wired, removed stories after it was discovered that the articles, allegedly written by a freelancer named “Margaux Blanchard,” were likely AI inventions. The suspected fraud was discovered only after Jacob Furedi, the editor of the independent publication Dispatch, received a suspicious pitch and began digging into the writer’s work. According to reporting from The Daily Beast, after the revelations, Business Insider quietly removed at least 34 essays under 13 different bylines.
After weeks of trudging through Goldiee’s online mess, I went back to my inbox to deal with the rest of the pitches that were still sitting there waiting for me. I was a freelance writer for most of my career, so as an editor, I’ve always done my best to respond to every thoughtful pitch I get. Looking at them now, though, all I could see was the synthetic sheen of artificial intelligence. There were probably some promising young writers buried in there somewhere. But I couldn’t bear to dig through the bullshit to try to find them.
The claim that media outlets make to convince us to ignore X is that there are editors committed to producing quality work. Readers can count on editors to separate the wheat from the increasing amount of chaff.
Yeah, well, that too is an illusion.
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