Speaker 1: I hadn't done a pitch call out about a year,
Speaker 1: I guess, so I hadn't really been paying attention to
Speaker 1: what that world was like. But this time I got like,
Speaker 1: way more pitches than ever, very quickly, from all over
Speaker 1: the place. It was very different than the year before.
Speaker 2: Nicholas hun Brown is the editor of The Local, which
Speaker 2: is an independent online magazine that covers social issues in Toronto.
Speaker 2: Last September, they put out an open call for freelance
Speaker 2: journalists to pitch stories for their upcoming issue.
Speaker 1: We were looking to assign stories about healthcare and money.
Speaker 1: There's been some creeping privatization in Ontario where we live,
Speaker 1: so we put out a call for pitches. I posted
Speaker 1: something on Blue Sky just asking freelancers give me a suggestions.
Speaker 2: Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there
Speaker 2: was one in particular that stood out.
Speaker 1: This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goald. She
Speaker 1: said in the email that she'd written for a bunch
Speaker 1: of these Canadian publications that do similar work to what
Speaker 1: we do. It was a well written pitch, I thought,
Speaker 1: and when I did a quick Google of her, she
Speaker 1: had bylines and a bunch of you know, repude of publications,
Speaker 1: The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know,
Speaker 1: when you see someone has written for all these other publications,
Speaker 1: my first instinct was, like, that seems legit. You know,
Speaker 1: these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be too suspicious.
Speaker 3: Why would you be?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Victoria Goldie turned out not to be who
Speaker 2: she said she was, and this sent Nick down a
Speaker 2: really weird rabbit hole investigation. You've heard of fake news, Well,
Speaker 2: welcome to a new scam. Fake journalists from Kaleidoscope and
Speaker 2: iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 3: This is kill Switch. I'm Dexterah Thomas.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2: Back in September, when Nick first put out this call
Speaker 2: for pitches, the magazine was deliberately trying to expand their
Speaker 2: freelance writer pool. They were hoping to find new writers,
Speaker 2: new voices, people with interesting stories to tell.
Speaker 1: Part of our mandate is we want to work with
Speaker 1: young writers. We want to work with people from different
Speaker 1: parts of the city, different backgrounds. We are actively seeking
Speaker 1: to work with people who maybe don't have the clips,
Speaker 1: are not as experienced, but are able to bring a
Speaker 1: point of view and a story to us that we
Speaker 1: won't found elsewhere, So like the pitch meant a whole lot,
Speaker 1: Like if you could tell me an awesome story in
Speaker 1: a pitch, if I could see your style on the pitch,
Speaker 1: if I could see that you had like an idea
Speaker 1: I couldn't find elsewhere, that would go a long way.
Speaker 2: And Victoria Goldie's pitch hit all those things. It was
Speaker 2: exactly what Nick was looking for. Her pitch was about
Speaker 2: a debate in Canada about something called membership medicine. So
Speaker 2: you probably know that Canada has free essential health care,
Speaker 2: but membership medicine is basically when patients pay their doctors
Speaker 2: directly for more premium services, and man, Victoria was on it.
Speaker 2: In that initial email to Nick, she wrote, quote, the
Speaker 2: story would track how these plans transform healthcare into something
Speaker 2: resembling Netflix or Amazon Prime, and what this means for
Speaker 2: a public system that has long prided itself on universality.
Speaker 1: The pitch she sent it indicated that she done a
Speaker 1: lot of reporting already. She'd done some research. She said,
Speaker 1: She'd spoken with a couple prominent doctors here. She seemed
Speaker 1: to have some like patients who are willing to talk
Speaker 1: about their experiences with privatized medical care. It seemed like
Speaker 1: a promising pitch, so we thought, you know, let's take
Speaker 1: a shot on this person.
Speaker 2: Just as a fellow freelancer. I appreciate Nick taking that
Speaker 2: shot on Victoria because I've been there. You're trying to
Speaker 2: show an editor that you're the person to hire, so
Speaker 2: you do all this extra work up front, like, look,
Speaker 2: I've already done this interview, I've already got access to
Speaker 2: the hospital. Just say the word boss, and I will
Speaker 2: write the best article just for you. So please understand
Speaker 2: right now, at this point, I am rooting for Victoria Goldie.
Speaker 2: So in their next meeting, Nick and his editorial team
Speaker 2: decide to move forward with Victoria. But then he looked
Speaker 2: at Victoria's original email again and realized something that he
Speaker 2: hadn't noticed before.
Speaker 1: You know, I went back to her pitch, and some
Speaker 1: other questions popped up in my mind, Like the biggest
Speaker 1: one was is she in Toronto? You know, when I
Speaker 1: looked at her Guardian stuff, it was all about her
Speaker 1: being in England. Once you'd done stuff for American magazines,
Speaker 1: it seemed as if she was writing as an American,
Speaker 1: So I wondered, you know that there are people who
Speaker 1: are international. There's no reason that you could be publishing
Speaker 1: and reporting from different places. But yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: question I had. And the second was that she'd done
Speaker 1: so much pre reporting for this. She'd done so much
Speaker 1: work on this pitch. Within like, you know, a week
Speaker 1: or two of me setting out the call out, she'd
Speaker 1: interviewed four people or something. We're in that first pitch.
Speaker 1: And I was a freelancer forever. I know that process,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's useful to do some reporting before you
Speaker 1: get a story assigned. But like that much is there's
Speaker 1: a lot that's a risk, right, there's no guarantee that
Speaker 1: you're going to land the story. So then I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, there's times where someone could be a student
Speaker 1: journalist and then they're reusing interviews they've done before. There's
Speaker 1: different reasons that could happen. But that made me question
Speaker 1: some things, so he dug a little deeper. So then
Speaker 1: I wanted to just see what stories she'd done for
Speaker 1: Canadian publics. I'd seen the work that she'd done at
Speaker 1: The Guardian, the work she'd done elsewhere, and in her
Speaker 1: pitch she said she'd written for our national in these
Speaker 1: papers of the Globe and Mail, the Walrus kind of
Speaker 1: magazines that are like us. So I just googled her
Speaker 1: name along with those publications, and nothing came up. This
Speaker 1: is where Nick starts to get really suspicious. Could Victoria
Speaker 1: just be lying about publishing in all these different places?
Speaker 1: And if she was, what else could she be lying about?
Speaker 1: She went back to look at her pitch to see
Speaker 1: if there was any other explanation for this. Then I
Speaker 1: was looking at all these quotes that she had in
Speaker 1: her pitch, and some of them were from regular patients,
Speaker 1: she said, and some were from some prominent doctors in Toronto.
Speaker 1: And my colleague happens to know one of these doctors.
Speaker 1: So he shot her an email and said, did you
Speaker 1: speak to a journalist called Victoria Goldie and this doctor?
Speaker 1: Doctor Daniel Martin said, no, never heard of her. That's
Speaker 1: very weird that I'm being quoted this way. So when
Speaker 1: that happened, I kind of knew. I knew what was
Speaker 1: going on, right, Like, I looked at the pitch again,
Speaker 1: I read it with kind of different eyes, and it
Speaker 1: felt to me as if someone had been using generative
Speaker 1: AI to create a pitch with made up quotes from
Speaker 1: real people, and they had been making up some of
Speaker 1: their botolines in Canadian publications, and when you reread it again,
Speaker 1: it was like there was some chat gptisms, you know,
Speaker 1: if there was some like formulaic writing about this pitch
Speaker 1: is important because of X, it's timely, because of why,
Speaker 1: it's perfect for your publication, because of Z. It felt
Speaker 1: a little When I looked at it more closely, you
Speaker 1: could see some things that felt a little inhuman.
Speaker 2: I guess, hmmm, See that's tough because I've definitely pitched
Speaker 2: things that I've used language like that. No, totally, like
Speaker 2: that's what you do, Like you tell, hey, I'd like
Speaker 2: to write this, and it's timely because this is happening.
Speaker 2: It's the anniversary of whatever. We should revisit this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, all the telles for chat GPT or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like people say looking for M dashes and I'm so
Speaker 1: resentful of that. I use M dashes all the time,
Speaker 1: like it's same. So I don't know, I don't have
Speaker 1: a good way of spawning something. But the made up
Speaker 1: quotes and the kind of made up bylines made me
Speaker 1: think this is what was happening.
Speaker 2: So okay, you're starting to think that this is AI.
Speaker 2: What do you do next?
Speaker 1: Then I just got really curious, right, Like, it's clear
Speaker 1: that this was a fake pitch, but like, what about
Speaker 1: all of those other bylines, Like all those other stories.
Speaker 1: There's dozens of them across the Internet that she's written.
Speaker 1: Like if she was faking stuff in this pitch for
Speaker 1: us so blatantly, what about those stories?
Speaker 2: So Nick started looking at Victoria Goldie's previous body of
Speaker 2: work and he kind of got obsessed, and that obsession
Speaker 2: led him to some pretty weird discoveries. That's after the break.
Speaker 2: After Nick puts together that Victoria seems to have not
Speaker 2: only chat GPT or pitch, but also lied about working
Speaker 2: on other Canadians publications, he decides that he needs to
Speaker 2: figure out how far this rabbit hole goes. He's pretty
Speaker 2: sure he's being laed to, but he's still curious. You
Speaker 2: didn't confront her immediately?
Speaker 1: No, I wanted to know a little more, did. I
Speaker 1: did send some follow up emails. I said, like, did
Speaker 1: you actually speak with these people? And she said yes,
Speaker 1: I did. I said, are you based in Toronto because
Speaker 1: we need local reporting? She said, yeah, absolutely and based
Speaker 1: in Toronto. So the kind of like I understood the
Speaker 1: level of deception that was going on. I guess I
Speaker 1: understood that she was making stuff up. So when I
Speaker 1: started looking into the work that she'd published, the first
Speaker 1: one I looked at was this feature from the Journal
Speaker 1: of the Law Society of Scotland, which is like an
Speaker 1: in depth feature that was about law firms disappearing from
Speaker 1: the Scottish Highlands and like what were rural people doing?
Speaker 1: And I quoted like members of parliament, I quoted a
Speaker 1: bunch of lawyers, academics, and then a bunch of regular people.
Speaker 1: So I was just wondering, like, this is a real article.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any of the regular people, you know,
Speaker 1: when she begins an anecdote, like Fiona forty to a
Speaker 1: school teacher in Glengarry or whatever, like those people google them,
Speaker 1: can find any of them. So then I emailed the
Speaker 1: people that she spoke to who were real, like a
Speaker 1: professor called Elaine Sutherland who she quoted in that piece.
Speaker 1: And I just emailed and said, did you speak to
Speaker 1: this writer? And she said no, absolutely not. But what's
Speaker 1: weird is that this sounds like the kind of thing
Speaker 1: I would say, wow, And this is the response that
Speaker 1: I was getting in a lot of places, and I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's one of the eerier things. Right. It's
Speaker 1: not someone just making stuff up, but it is, I
Speaker 1: believe AI searching through the internet thinking who is the
Speaker 1: likely person who can talk about Scottish law firms disappearing
Speaker 1: from the Highlands, you find someone who maybe has spoken
Speaker 1: too that in the past, or written a research paper
Speaker 1: about it, or whatever it is, and then kind of
Speaker 1: invents quotes that sound kind of like in the ballpark
Speaker 1: of what you might say. So that was the first
Speaker 1: piece that I thought, Okay, this is a made up story,
Speaker 1: and then I just kept looking. There were more. There
Speaker 1: was a story in Dwell that quoted like ten prominent
Speaker 1: international designers and architects, and I just started sending emails
Speaker 1: to all of them, and they had not spoken to
Speaker 1: this person.
Speaker 2: Victoria had published work in The Guardian, in Business Insider,
Speaker 2: New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Africa, Vogue, Philippines. I could
Speaker 2: keep going here. This is a resume that almost any
Speaker 2: freelance journalists would be really jealous of.
Speaker 1: How many articles should you have out there? I think
Speaker 1: over two dozen. I think I've got a spreadsheet of
Speaker 1: over two dozen articles. You made a spreadsheet I got,
Speaker 1: I got obsessed. I don't know I was not gonna
Speaker 1: write about this. We're a local publication that only reads
Speaker 1: about Toronto, right, I was just doing this set of
Speaker 1: curiosity to begin with. But I don't know, it just
Speaker 1: seems so wild to me that this stuff was out there.
Speaker 1: And maybe it sound like overly, you know, people are
Speaker 1: lying on the internet, but I found it shocking. I guess,
Speaker 1: how dare somebody lie on the internet. Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I lie on the Internet under the guardian's name or whatever.
Speaker 3: That is different. Yeah, that is different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, getting on there and saying, hey, yo, I don't know,
Speaker 2: somebody like lying on their dating profile. Yo, I'm six
Speaker 2: foot two and like, bro, you're five to three.
Speaker 1: Like okay.
Speaker 2: Maybe not a nice thing to do, but also very
Speaker 2: different from fooling the public into thinking that something happened.
Speaker 2: And some people said some things that they actually never did.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So one place that had published Victoria's work had actually
Speaker 2: already taken some stuff down, but they didn't say it
Speaker 2: was because of AI.
Speaker 1: I emailed with editors of other publications and spoke to
Speaker 1: a former editor at Pop Sugar, which had taken down
Speaker 1: a number of articles that she'd written. So I went
Speaker 1: online and it said that was taken down because there
Speaker 1: inconsistencies or didn't live up to Pop Sugar standards. The
Speaker 1: editor said that there were plagiarism issues with the stories.
Speaker 2: So walk me through this, Like, what were you feeling
Speaker 2: at this time?
Speaker 1: I felt embarrassed to begin with. I think the pitch
Speaker 1: call was I said something about like the ways that
Speaker 1: health and money collide and twenty twenty five and Ontario
Speaker 1: something like that, and it felt to me like the
Speaker 1: pitches were some large language model taken that little prompt
Speaker 1: and sending me back like what I wanted to hear.
Speaker 1: And of course I was like, oh, yeah, I'm into this,
Speaker 1: this makes sense. This is all about how health and
Speaker 1: money collide in twenty twenty five, Like I was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was embarrassed at being kind of like sent back
Speaker 1: my own prompt in a way that felt like it
Speaker 1: was just designed to appeal to me. And I got
Speaker 1: fooled right as I moved through it, though, like I
Speaker 1: don't know, I began to feel maybe it sounds overblown,
Speaker 1: but like a sense of despair, Like at a certain point,
Speaker 1: I'm tracking down all this stuff she's telling lies all
Speaker 1: over the place. I go back to my inbox, which
Speaker 1: still has a million pitches, and I'm going through it
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing the ones that look so synthetic. So
Speaker 1: AI and I started idly googling some of those authors,
Speaker 1: and I see that they have places across the internet
Speaker 1: as well. And I'm not going to do a deep
Speaker 1: dive on every single freelancer that ends up in my inbox,
Speaker 1: but like, how much of this stuff is out there?
Speaker 1: Like how much of I don't know?
Speaker 3: You know that?
Speaker 1: That was depressing to me. I spent my whole life
Speaker 1: writing journalism, and this feeling of this just being the
Speaker 1: tip of a pretty like awful iceberg was dispiriting.
Speaker 3: Guess.
Speaker 2: After investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers.
Speaker 2: He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to her. I had like so
Speaker 1: many questions about who this person really is, Like I
Speaker 1: as I'm in this world, I'm reading their writing right,
Speaker 1: and I'm and some of its first person stuff, and
Speaker 1: it's all obviously all a mix of true and false
Speaker 1: or completely false. I'm trying to figure out where they are.
Speaker 1: It feels like from some other earlier writing and some
Speaker 1: other social media that they're they may be based in Nigeria,
Speaker 1: or at least or from Nigeria. I said, a ton
Speaker 1: of questions for this person, so I wanted to get
Speaker 1: them on the phone. So I so I did that,
Speaker 1: emailed and said, let's let's chat about this piece.
Speaker 2: Nick emails Victoria asking if he can talk more about
Speaker 2: her article. From a freelancers standpoint, and initial check in
Speaker 2: call is a pretty normal next step toward officially being
Speaker 2: accepted and being paid. So Victoria agreed to a video
Speaker 2: call and they set it up for later that week.
Speaker 1: In the ten minutes before that was about to start,
Speaker 1: they emailed and said, I think I have internet connections.
Speaker 1: Let's do this over audio. And then I got them
Speaker 1: over the phone. And it was a strange conversation. It
Speaker 1: was a it was a kind of surreal experience.
Speaker 3: What happened.
Speaker 1: So I guess in the fantasy version of this conversation
Speaker 1: that I had been trying to plan out was I
Speaker 1: would present them with some inconsistencies and they get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger, and a certain point they would just have
Speaker 1: to admit these lies and then maybe we could actually
Speaker 1: talk about who they were, and you know, were they
Speaker 1: are real journalists who had gotten in over their heads.
Speaker 1: Were they a scammer who had just like found some
Speaker 1: easy marks with like overworked editors. That was the like
Speaker 1: the unrealistic dream version of this conversation. How it actually
Speaker 1: happened was I got on the phone someone very chipper
Speaker 1: who send it to my ear like a young woman
Speaker 1: with an African accent was on the phone. I asked
Speaker 1: where she was based in Toronto, and she cheerfully said Bluer,
Speaker 1: which is like if you said, whereabouts do you live
Speaker 1: in New York and they just said Broadway right, okay,
Speaker 1: But you know, this person had had googled the street
Speaker 1: in Toronto, so I was I was already, you know,
Speaker 1: well done. Yeah, And then I kind of just walked
Speaker 1: them through some of the inconsistencies. And I didn't want
Speaker 1: to spook them necessarily. I didn't want them to hang
Speaker 1: up right away. So I asked them if they'd spoken
Speaker 1: to the doctor. In her pitch, she said yes, she had.
Speaker 1: I mentioned that, you know, we actually spoke to that
Speaker 1: doctor and she says, she didn't speak to you, and
Speaker 1: she said, oh, yes, of course, my personal assistant I
Speaker 1: actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact
Speaker 1: that like freelance journalists don't have personal assistance. I kind of, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: let that drift past. I asked why I couldn't find
Speaker 1: the stories in the Walrus and the Globe and Mail,
Speaker 1: and she said most of those were done online only.
Speaker 1: I emailed the editors from the Globe and the Walrus
Speaker 1: and they said they've never worked with her. I asked
Speaker 1: if she just recently moved to Toronto, because it seemed
Speaker 1: like she was writing first person stories from London and
Speaker 1: other places, and she said, yeah, she just moved this year.
Speaker 1: I asked her why the stories were gone from Pop
Speaker 1: Sugar and she said, oh, the editor moved on from
Speaker 1: Pop Sugar, so they took down all the articles that
Speaker 1: they worked talking with me, which is not how is
Speaker 1: not how that works. Every question she just sort of answered,
Speaker 1: very cheerfully, very upbeat, didn't seem to be shaken by it.
Speaker 1: She had quick responses to every I mean, implausible, but
Speaker 1: quick and ready. It's almost impressive. And then I kind
Speaker 1: of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: I started talking about that story in the Scottish Journal.
Speaker 1: I said that she'd quoted this professor Elaine Sutherland. I said,
Speaker 1: I'd actually spoken to Elaine Sutherland, and she said she
Speaker 1: has never spoken to you. And I realized in the
Speaker 1: pause afterwards that she that she was gone, that she'd
Speaker 1: hung up. She's not responded to any email since. I've
Speaker 1: not heard from her since.
Speaker 2: And it looks like that last question did it for Victoria.
Speaker 2: She knew the jig was up, but Nick still wanted
Speaker 2: to find out who is Victoria Goldie. We'll get into
Speaker 2: that after the break. After that phone call, Victoria quietly
Speaker 2: removed herself from the Internet.
Speaker 1: In the days that followed, the x account that had
Speaker 1: been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her mockrack page,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a list of all a journalists
Speaker 1: stories that went private. Her personal website went down. She
Speaker 1: kind of disappeared after that phone call, and I say,
Speaker 1: she I at this point, I don't not know who
Speaker 1: who like Victoria Goldie is. The evidence suggests that this
Speaker 1: person is either from or still lives in Nigeria. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's a whole farm of people working together
Speaker 1: and sending out stuff under one byline, although it could
Speaker 1: be that. Something that crossed my mind a lot for
Speaker 1: a while, I thought maybe there's no singular person attached
Speaker 1: to this name at all. Maybe it's just, you know,
Speaker 1: one of a dozen bylines that people are using to
Speaker 1: get paid for some writing. I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 1: That one of the earliest stories I found under that byline,
Speaker 1: it was a couple months before Chatgebet came out, which
Speaker 1: is kind of the demarketing line I think, after which
Speaker 1: like you can't trust that a sentence was written by
Speaker 1: a human, And it was like it felt different. Those
Speaker 1: early stories were there's some grammatical mistakes, they're clumsier, they're
Speaker 1: less smooth, less slick, but they seem to represent like
Speaker 1: a real person talking about real things.
Speaker 2: One article from that pre chatgpt era is from May
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty two. It's a piece that Victoria Goldie
Speaker 2: wrote for a website called black Ballad with the title
Speaker 2: how I'm learning to navigate toxic positivity on social media,
Speaker 2: And there's this line where she writes, quote, there's this
Speaker 2: immense pressure to be productive. Most people like me are
Speaker 2: tired and trying to survive day to day.
Speaker 1: So I think this is a real individual. This is
Speaker 1: not their name necessarily, but I think this is one individual.
Speaker 1: And you see a kind of continuity of interest throughout
Speaker 1: their into key dramas, they're into afrobeats. There's some continuity
Speaker 1: of which feels like a person there. I can't know
Speaker 1: for sure, but I think this as an individual who,
Speaker 1: at least in those early stories, is writing about going
Speaker 1: online like the rest of us and making her miserable
Speaker 1: seeing people who are presenting themselves as doing so well,
Speaker 1: seeing all this hustle culture and they're just struggling to
Speaker 1: get by a day to day.
Speaker 2: So in the beginning she was writing about going online
Speaker 2: seeing hustle culture, getting kind of depressed. And that's what
Speaker 2: the hustle culture Rose is selling you right now, is hey,
Speaker 2: here's how to make a bunch of money by cranking
Speaker 2: out content with AI. So kind of can't beat them,
Speaker 2: join them type thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So in the end, like I don't know who
Speaker 1: this person is, I have some sympathy for them.
Speaker 2: After all of this, Nick decided to make his investigation
Speaker 2: public and he published a piece in the local and
Speaker 2: that's actually where I first read about it. The title
Speaker 2: of his piece was called Investigating a Possible Scammer in
Speaker 2: Journalism's AI era.
Speaker 1: We published the piece, it got a crazy response, but
Speaker 1: I think the most like telling response. All I got
Speaker 1: was so many emails from editors from around the world,
Speaker 1: which was kind of mind blowing. Victoria Goldie had been
Speaker 1: pitching like everywhere, everywhere, from nature to an Oakland startup
Speaker 1: that began like a few weeks ago doing book reviews.
Speaker 1: Someone on the West Coast who was running this tiny
Speaker 1: indigenous run publication said that they had just assigned a
Speaker 1: story to her and they just, oh my god, did
Speaker 1: a quick Google to her and they're like, thank you
Speaker 1: so much. We were very close to sending the contract.
Speaker 1: Someone else from this publication called Republic. They phoned me
Speaker 1: up there in the middle of a second draft with her.
Speaker 1: They were editing a story about people living in their
Speaker 1: vans in the American Southwest that was based on Victoria's
Speaker 1: own experience living in a van in the American Southwest.
Speaker 1: The Financial Times like around the world. This this person
Speaker 1: was really incredibly prolific.
Speaker 2: Just the sheer volume of pitches that Victoria Goldie was
Speaker 2: sending out might give us a hint at her motivations.
Speaker 2: Journalism is famously not a very lucrative career, especially for
Speaker 2: a freelance journalist. Ask me how I know, and maybe
Speaker 2: pre ai Victoria was having trouble finding work, But if
Speaker 2: you can start writing for dozens of places at once,
Speaker 2: that might start to add up.
Speaker 1: I guess part of what's interesting to me is, I
Speaker 1: think we were offering two thousand bucks for this story.
Speaker 1: That's our rate Dwell paid, you know, I think she
Speaker 1: got fifteen hundred dollars for that or something in that
Speaker 1: Dwell article. If you actually had interviewed ten of the
Speaker 1: top designers in the world, like you know that fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, it doesn't go far. If you entered into
Speaker 1: chat GPT and get this thing out of five minutes later,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty good return, right.
Speaker 2: And for a long time she got away with it.
Speaker 2: Victoria Goldie had dozens of articles across the Internet for
Speaker 2: a bunch of really well respected publications. By the end
Speaker 2: of Nick's investigation, four of her old articles had come down,
Speaker 2: but as of this recording, there are still a few
Speaker 2: out there. How do we change editorial processes? I mean,
Speaker 2: how is the local change their editorial process or they're
Speaker 2: different hoops that somebody has to jump through to submitted article.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you got a big response on the internet,
Speaker 1: but it got a big response in our newsroom. Like
Speaker 1: we've been thinking about how do we do what we
Speaker 1: do going forward in this era? Like I said at
Speaker 1: the beginning, we want to work with new writers, right,
Speaker 1: like this is our whole thing. I owe my career to.
Speaker 1: Like a pitch used to be this key that could
Speaker 1: open the door even if you didn't know anybody at
Speaker 1: a publication. If you could write an amazing pitch, that's
Speaker 1: a way into places. A pitch now is not connected
Speaker 1: or is not necessarily connected to any human being. Right,
Speaker 1: So when we are trying to find new writers, what
Speaker 1: do you do? It's made our jobs difficult. Like we're
Speaker 1: talking about I'm going to do more coffees with young freelancers.
Speaker 1: I'm going to phone their editors and but this is
Speaker 1: all like, this is all a bummer. This all takes
Speaker 1: so much time, it takes so much money. Everyone's already overworked.
Speaker 1: And I think the fear is that you're just gonna
Speaker 1: work with people you already know. You're just going to
Speaker 1: work with established people. You're never going to take a
Speaker 1: chance on someone new because did they write their pitch?
Speaker 1: Did they write their previous story?
Speaker 3: Like you can't trust anything?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So I am doing more phone calls earlier
Speaker 1: in the process. With writers, at least you get a
Speaker 1: sense of a person. You know, you're talking to a
Speaker 1: real person. We're like, we've beefed up our fact checking process,
Speaker 1: so people send annotated drafts or checking through them. I
Speaker 1: think if you had robust fact checking, like this story
Speaker 1: is not getting into twelve magazine, right. The depressing thing
Speaker 1: about this scammer as opposed to like classic scammers like
Speaker 1: Jason Blair or like Stephen Glass, Right, like people making
Speaker 1: up stuff in the past. They were doing that in
Speaker 1: a world or journalism has a certain amount of power
Speaker 1: and prestige, and they're doing it for that reason. This
Speaker 1: is people who are taking advantage of an ecosystem that
Speaker 1: is like already pretty broken and yeah and overworked, overworked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not fact checkers. I don't think an editor at
Speaker 1: some of these places could have thought twice about some
Speaker 1: of this stuff. Even so, Yeah, to combat it, it
Speaker 1: would take more money, would take more resources, it would
Speaker 1: take journalists spending more time in that work. And we're
Speaker 1: already at a point where like we're going in the
Speaker 1: opposite direction.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I mean when when you said robust fact checking,
Speaker 2: any journalists listening to this are probably laughing and or
Speaker 2: spit out their coffee or crying into their coffee, probably
Speaker 2: because that's one of the things that gets.
Speaker 3: Cut, you know.
Speaker 2: That's like do organizations have fact checkers, Yes, but maybe
Speaker 2: they used to have five and they have one or
Speaker 2: the editor maybe is being asked to handle all that
Speaker 2: work and so we got to spend money to clean
Speaker 2: it up. Yeah, And I mean this is it's interesting
Speaker 2: because this isn't really necessarily about AI. You know, I
Speaker 2: hate to echo the AI boosters here, right, but this
Speaker 2: is something that's often said, AI is a tool, and
Speaker 2: this is somebody who and maybe multiple somebodies who are
Speaker 2: using just a tool that is more efficient.
Speaker 1: Exactly the scale would be impossible with it at the
Speaker 1: efficiency I would not have heard from dozens of editors
Speaker 1: around the world had been pitched stories that fit pretty
Speaker 1: well into their niche Like we're kind of we're way off.
Speaker 1: That's only possible with the technology, right, But yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is human beings using that technology to do
Speaker 1: something that they've done for a while.
Speaker 2: But there is something new that comes with these AI
Speaker 2: models that have scraped everything ever written. It's changing people's
Speaker 2: definitions of truth and lies in ways that journalists haven't
Speaker 2: had to think about before. And I'm not just saying,
Speaker 2: you know, oh truth, there's important, lies or bad. I
Speaker 2: just mean that it's getting weird.
Speaker 1: So one of the responses I got from one of
Speaker 1: these experts who I followed up on, who had quotes
Speaker 1: made up by Victoria Goldie for one of these stories,
Speaker 1: they said, that's not me. I don't remember speaking to
Speaker 1: this writer, but that sounds like something I would say,
Speaker 1: And I'm okay with that material being out there, and
Speaker 1: that like wow, that took me back, Like that that
Speaker 1: indicates that we are part of a world where, like
Speaker 1: I think we already know that a lot of people
Speaker 1: don't mind the slap, like the slop is ever where,
Speaker 1: because people are fine with it if it's that's up
Speaker 1: some of their preconceived ideas or it seems close enough, right.
Speaker 1: And the fact that individuals themselves are okay with being represented,
Speaker 1: you know it's close enough to what they said or
Speaker 1: what they believe, that makes me think like we are
Speaker 1: in a we're entering a whole new paradigm about like
Speaker 1: what truth even is.
Speaker 2: And that is like I don't know, all right, counterpoint,
Speaker 2: what if it doesn't matter that we've got AI journalists. Look,
Speaker 2: you wanted an article on the kind of creeping privatization
Speaker 2: of the healthcare system. You have a general idea of
Speaker 2: what some of these people are going to say, and
Speaker 2: for a lay reader who isn't really familiar with everything,
Speaker 2: they need to be brought up at speed on the basics. Right,
Speaker 2: So what's the harm in having, you know, some chatbot
Speaker 2: fill in the blanks for them and say some things
Speaker 2: that are pretty plausible from a few experts. The AI
Speaker 2: models is trained on everything they've said. It knows about
Speaker 2: what they're gonna say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, this is the argument that kind of
Speaker 1: terrifies me, right, Like, I think, to be.
Speaker 3: Clear, I'm not advocating for this.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I know, I know, I know, I
Speaker 1: hear you taking the point of view, Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, they don't know what individuals say, right,
Speaker 1: everyone is surprising, and a I can only say what's
Speaker 1: been said already. It's incapable of actually advancing a story.
Speaker 1: And the news is about saying what is new, right,
Speaker 1: and that is something that I think cannot be replaced
Speaker 1: at all. But more fundamentally, like I don't know, we
Speaker 1: just can't be cool with having stuff that is not
Speaker 1: true presented as true because it's close enough, or it's
Speaker 1: like we're losing that grip on you know, when someone's
Speaker 1: quoted they have to have said a thing, when when
Speaker 1: like I feel like I'm losing my mind as we're
Speaker 1: kind of moving away from actually recognizing that, like when
Speaker 1: you say stuff's true, it's got to be It's got
Speaker 1: to be true. Otherwise, what are we even? How can
Speaker 1: we talk? How can we argue? How can we agree
Speaker 1: on anything?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we were, we were in the post
Speaker 2: truth thing already. It's like post post truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think like university professors have been here for
Speaker 1: a while already, Like it's been a few years of
Speaker 1: them dealing with this world. But for me personally, in
Speaker 1: like my little corner of magazine journalism, I haven't been
Speaker 1: confronted with it until now.
Speaker 3: You know, it's interesting you.
Speaker 2: Bring that up, because I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: are curious about how university and professors or high school
Speaker 2: professors or whatever dealing with the fact that, yeah, a
Speaker 2: lot of their students are probably just typing a prompt
Speaker 2: into CHATGBT and then you know, cranking out a thousand
Speaker 2: word essay. But that's a very controlled environment. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a fish bowl. If somebody at the university down
Speaker 2: the road chat gbt generates their history exam, that doesn't
Speaker 2: affect me personally. But if somebody is chatgebt generating an
Speaker 2: article about what the LAPD is doing or not doing, that.
Speaker 3: Could affect me.
Speaker 2: And we're already a stage where people just straight up
Speaker 2: don't trust journalism at all. And what do we do
Speaker 2: if the if the writers are lying to the editors,
Speaker 2: or the writers don't even exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I have no answers. It's weighing on me.
Speaker 2: As of right now, as I'm recording this, not all
Speaker 2: of Victoria Goldie's work is gone. So among that work
Speaker 2: are three articles that she wrote for Business Insider. Two
Speaker 2: of those were published just before chat ChiPT dropped in
Speaker 2: November of twenty twenty two, and one came out right
Speaker 2: after I dug into all of these articles. Each one
Speaker 2: is an interview with one person who, as far as
Speaker 2: I can tell, seems to actually exists. The articles are
Speaker 2: kind of boring, but they seem legit. But there's also
Speaker 2: this really interesting article that she wrote for The Guardian,
Speaker 2: and this one only came out in September of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. So Victoria Goldie writes about hanging out in
Speaker 2: East London and going to raves and soccer games, mixing
Speaker 2: with different people, learning about different cultures, and near the
Speaker 2: end of this really personal essay, she writes, quote, the
Speaker 2: future of our music is not written by algorithm. That
Speaker 2: article has been taken down? So was that one real?
Speaker 2: Is any of this real? How many of us even care?
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 2: I don't want to lose sight of how all this started.
Speaker 2: Nick has finally put his investigation to rest, and the
Speaker 2: local special on healthcare in Canada is now out and
Speaker 2: it's ready for you to read it. And if you're
Speaker 2: wondering if they're going to put something about Victoria Goldie
Speaker 2: in there, I.
Speaker 1: Don't think so. I don't think so. We're moving moving on,
Speaker 1: We're moving on.
Speaker 3: Moving on, moving on. I dig it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for checking out another episode of
Speaker 2: kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
Speaker 2: can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC
Speaker 2: or on Instagram.
Speaker 3: We're at kill Switch Pod.
Speaker 2: And before you move on to doing something else, maybe
Speaker 2: think of leaving the show or a review. It helps
Speaker 2: other people find the show which in turn helps us
Speaker 2: keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted by Me
Speaker 2: Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and
Speaker 2: Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle Murdoch,
Speaker 2: and Kyle also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive
Speaker 2: producers are Ozma Lashin from Geshatgadour and Kate Osborne from iHeart.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers of Katrina Norville and Nikki E Tour
Speaker 2: catch on next week
Speaker 4: Goodbye