In the almost exactly three years since the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a tidal wave of AI slop has turned large swathes of the internet into an almost unrecognizable hellscape.
Text carelessly generated by a large language models has invaded countless industries, from lawyers citing cases that were hallucinated by an AI to insipid lyrics crooned by chart-topping country music artists that don’t actually exist in real life.
The world of journalism, in particular, has been facing an existential crisis as the tech lets anyone with a pulse whip up prose that sounds authoritative and true — but in reality, as we’ve seen time and again, turns out to be anything but.
Case in point, in an excellent piece for Toronto-based online magazine The Local, editor Nicholas Hune-Brown detailed how he was almost fooled into assigning a story based on a pitch by a writer who identified herself as Victoria Goldiee.
The writer claimed to have written stories for several publications, which Hune-Brown initially confirmed with a quick Google search.
But it didn’t take long for some red flags to come up. First, there was the “stilted” phrasing in her emails, a hallmark of AI chatbots. Then, as it turned out, many of the quotes Goldiee used in her pieces were entirely made up, as Hune-Brown found out via his own investigation.
“I did not speak with this reporter and did not give this quote,” designer Young Huh, who was quoted by Goldiee in a piece for design publication Dwell — which is owned by the same parent company as Futurism — told Hune-Brown.
Other editors noticed similar discrepancies after being pitched by the suspiciously industrious writer.
“As I recall, the articles bylined by Victoria borrowed far too heavily from articles published elsewhere,” former PS editor Nancy Einhart told Hune-Brown. “I remember feeling disappointed because I really liked Victoria’s pitches.”
“You are actually the third editor to contact me about this writer in the past couple of months,” she added. “She is clearly on a pitch tour.”
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