WEBVTT - how an editor uncovered an AI journalist 0:00:10.960 --> 0:00:12.960 I hadn't done a pitch call out about a year, 0:00:12.960 --> 0:00:15.120 I guess, so I hadn't really been paying attention to 0:00:15.200 --> 0:00:17.759 what that world was like. But this time I got like, 0:00:17.960 --> 0:00:22.000 way more pitches than ever, very quickly, from all over 0:00:22.040 --> 0:00:24.680 the place. It was very different than the year before. 0:00:25.200 --> 0:00:28.280 Nicholas hun Brown is the editor of The Local, which 0:00:28.360 --> 0:00:32.120 is an independent online magazine that covers social issues in Toronto. 0:00:32.600 --> 0:00:35.360 Last September, they put out an open call for freelance 0:00:35.440 --> 0:00:38.320 journalists to pitch stories for their upcoming issue. 0:00:38.400 --> 0:00:41.760 We were looking to assign stories about healthcare and money. 0:00:41.880 --> 0:00:45.839 There's been some creeping privatization in Ontario where we live, 0:00:46.159 --> 0:00:48.600 so we put out a call for pitches. I posted 0:00:48.600 --> 0:00:51.880 something on Blue Sky just asking freelancers give me a suggestions. 0:00:52.200 --> 0:00:54.920 Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there 0:00:55.000 --> 0:00:57.560 was one in particular that stood out. 0:00:57.800 --> 0:01:00.640 This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goald. She 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:02.520 said in the email that she'd written for a bunch 0:01:02.560 --> 0:01:05.160 of these Canadian publications that do similar work to what 0:01:05.200 --> 0:01:07.319 we do. It was a well written pitch, I thought, 0:01:07.480 --> 0:01:09.160 and when I did a quick Google of her, she 0:01:09.240 --> 0:01:12.320 had bylines and a bunch of you know, repude of publications, 0:01:12.360 --> 0:01:15.319 The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know, 0:01:15.360 --> 0:01:17.680 when you see someone has written for all these other publications, 0:01:17.880 --> 0:01:20.399 my first instinct was, like, that seems legit. You know, 0:01:20.440 --> 0:01:22.840 these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to 0:01:22.840 --> 0:01:23.640 be too suspicious. 0:01:24.080 --> 0:01:24.720 Why would you be? 0:01:25.080 --> 0:01:28.840 Yeah, but Victoria Goldie turned out not to be who 0:01:28.880 --> 0:01:31.760 she said she was, and this sent Nick down a 0:01:31.800 --> 0:01:35.839 really weird rabbit hole investigation. You've heard of fake news, Well, 0:01:36.040 --> 0:01:44.200 welcome to a new scam. Fake journalists from Kaleidoscope and 0:01:44.280 --> 0:01:45.240 iHeart Podcasts. 0:01:50.560 --> 0:01:56.560 This is kill Switch. I'm Dexterah Thomas. 0:01:58.040 --> 0:02:35.359 I'm sorry, I'm goodbye. 0:02:39.240 --> 0:02:41.440 Back in September, when Nick first put out this call 0:02:41.480 --> 0:02:45.000 for pitches, the magazine was deliberately trying to expand their 0:02:45.040 --> 0:02:48.399 freelance writer pool. They were hoping to find new writers, 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:51.600 new voices, people with interesting stories to tell. 0:02:52.280 --> 0:02:53.880 Part of our mandate is we want to work with 0:02:53.919 --> 0:02:56.560 young writers. We want to work with people from different 0:02:56.560 --> 0:02:59.720 parts of the city, different backgrounds. We are actively seeking 0:02:59.760 --> 0:03:02.760 to work with people who maybe don't have the clips, 0:03:02.880 --> 0:03:05.960 are not as experienced, but are able to bring a 0:03:06.000 --> 0:03:07.880 point of view and a story to us that we 0:03:07.919 --> 0:03:10.800 won't found elsewhere, So like the pitch meant a whole lot, 0:03:10.840 --> 0:03:12.920 Like if you could tell me an awesome story in 0:03:12.960 --> 0:03:15.080 a pitch, if I could see your style on the pitch, 0:03:15.160 --> 0:03:17.440 if I could see that you had like an idea 0:03:17.480 --> 0:03:19.880 I couldn't find elsewhere, that would go a long way. 0:03:21.120 --> 0:03:24.320 And Victoria Goldie's pitch hit all those things. It was 0:03:24.440 --> 0:03:27.359 exactly what Nick was looking for. Her pitch was about 0:03:27.360 --> 0:03:31.400 a debate in Canada about something called membership medicine. So 0:03:31.560 --> 0:03:34.080 you probably know that Canada has free essential health care, 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:38.040 but membership medicine is basically when patients pay their doctors 0:03:38.080 --> 0:03:42.840 directly for more premium services, and man, Victoria was on it. 0:03:42.960 --> 0:03:46.160 In that initial email to Nick, she wrote, quote, the 0:03:46.240 --> 0:03:50.040 story would track how these plans transform healthcare into something 0:03:50.080 --> 0:03:53.720 resembling Netflix or Amazon Prime, and what this means for 0:03:53.800 --> 0:03:57.760 a public system that has long prided itself on universality. 0:03:58.160 --> 0:04:00.120 The pitch she sent it indicated that she done a 0:04:00.120 --> 0:04:03.080 lot of reporting already. She'd done some research. She said, 0:04:03.080 --> 0:04:06.400 She'd spoken with a couple prominent doctors here. She seemed 0:04:06.400 --> 0:04:08.400 to have some like patients who are willing to talk 0:04:08.440 --> 0:04:11.880 about their experiences with privatized medical care. It seemed like 0:04:11.880 --> 0:04:15.040 a promising pitch, so we thought, you know, let's take 0:04:15.040 --> 0:04:15.800 a shot on this person. 0:04:17.000 --> 0:04:20.240 Just as a fellow freelancer. I appreciate Nick taking that 0:04:20.240 --> 0:04:23.440 shot on Victoria because I've been there. You're trying to 0:04:23.480 --> 0:04:25.920 show an editor that you're the person to hire, so 0:04:26.040 --> 0:04:29.440 you do all this extra work up front, like, look, 0:04:29.600 --> 0:04:32.120 I've already done this interview, I've already got access to 0:04:32.160 --> 0:04:34.520 the hospital. Just say the word boss, and I will 0:04:34.520 --> 0:04:39.000 write the best article just for you. So please understand 0:04:39.080 --> 0:04:42.960 right now, at this point, I am rooting for Victoria Goldie. 0:04:43.120 --> 0:04:46.000 So in their next meeting, Nick and his editorial team 0:04:46.080 --> 0:04:48.880 decide to move forward with Victoria. But then he looked 0:04:48.920 --> 0:04:53.320 at Victoria's original email again and realized something that he 0:04:53.680 --> 0:04:54.920 hadn't noticed before. 0:04:55.560 --> 0:04:57.560 You know, I went back to her pitch, and some 0:04:57.680 --> 0:05:01.160 other questions popped up in my mind, Like the biggest 0:05:01.160 --> 0:05:03.240 one was is she in Toronto? You know, when I 0:05:03.240 --> 0:05:04.880 looked at her Guardian stuff, it was all about her 0:05:05.000 --> 0:05:09.040 being in England. Once you'd done stuff for American magazines, 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:11.479 it seemed as if she was writing as an American, 0:05:11.720 --> 0:05:13.440 So I wondered, you know that there are people who 0:05:13.440 --> 0:05:16.360 are international. There's no reason that you could be publishing 0:05:16.400 --> 0:05:19.000 and reporting from different places. But yeah, it was a 0:05:19.040 --> 0:05:21.200 question I had. And the second was that she'd done 0:05:21.279 --> 0:05:23.240 so much pre reporting for this. She'd done so much 0:05:23.279 --> 0:05:26.200 work on this pitch. Within like, you know, a week 0:05:26.279 --> 0:05:28.560 or two of me setting out the call out, she'd 0:05:28.560 --> 0:05:31.200 interviewed four people or something. We're in that first pitch. 0:05:31.400 --> 0:05:33.680 And I was a freelancer forever. I know that process, 0:05:33.720 --> 0:05:36.640 and sometimes it's useful to do some reporting before you 0:05:36.640 --> 0:05:39.400 get a story assigned. But like that much is there's 0:05:39.440 --> 0:05:41.240 a lot that's a risk, right, there's no guarantee that 0:05:41.240 --> 0:05:42.960 you're going to land the story. So then I thought, 0:05:43.000 --> 0:05:45.119 you know, there's times where someone could be a student 0:05:45.160 --> 0:05:48.440 journalist and then they're reusing interviews they've done before. There's 0:05:48.440 --> 0:05:52.040 different reasons that could happen. But that made me question 0:05:52.160 --> 0:05:56.280 some things, so he dug a little deeper. So then 0:05:56.320 --> 0:05:59.200 I wanted to just see what stories she'd done for 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:01.840 Canadian publics. I'd seen the work that she'd done at 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:04.480 The Guardian, the work she'd done elsewhere, and in her 0:06:04.480 --> 0:06:06.520 pitch she said she'd written for our national in these 0:06:06.560 --> 0:06:08.880 papers of the Globe and Mail, the Walrus kind of 0:06:09.080 --> 0:06:11.159 magazines that are like us. So I just googled her 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:14.880 name along with those publications, and nothing came up. This 0:06:15.120 --> 0:06:18.640 is where Nick starts to get really suspicious. Could Victoria 0:06:18.760 --> 0:06:21.680 just be lying about publishing in all these different places? 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.320 And if she was, what else could she be lying about? 0:06:25.920 --> 0:06:27.680 She went back to look at her pitch to see 0:06:27.680 --> 0:06:30.640 if there was any other explanation for this. Then I 0:06:30.680 --> 0:06:32.400 was looking at all these quotes that she had in 0:06:32.440 --> 0:06:35.239 her pitch, and some of them were from regular patients, 0:06:35.240 --> 0:06:38.040 she said, and some were from some prominent doctors in Toronto. 0:06:38.120 --> 0:06:40.279 And my colleague happens to know one of these doctors. 0:06:40.320 --> 0:06:41.720 So he shot her an email and said, did you 0:06:41.760 --> 0:06:44.880 speak to a journalist called Victoria Goldie and this doctor? 0:06:44.960 --> 0:06:48.279 Doctor Daniel Martin said, no, never heard of her. That's 0:06:48.880 --> 0:06:52.800 very weird that I'm being quoted this way. So when 0:06:52.800 --> 0:06:55.560 that happened, I kind of knew. I knew what was 0:06:55.600 --> 0:06:57.919 going on, right, Like, I looked at the pitch again, 0:06:58.160 --> 0:07:00.760 I read it with kind of different eyes, and it 0:07:00.760 --> 0:07:03.839 felt to me as if someone had been using generative 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:06.680 AI to create a pitch with made up quotes from 0:07:06.760 --> 0:07:10.000 real people, and they had been making up some of 0:07:10.040 --> 0:07:14.120 their botolines in Canadian publications, and when you reread it again, 0:07:14.200 --> 0:07:18.160 it was like there was some chat gptisms, you know, 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:22.120 if there was some like formulaic writing about this pitch 0:07:22.160 --> 0:07:24.320 is important because of X, it's timely, because of why, 0:07:24.320 --> 0:07:26.480 it's perfect for your publication, because of Z. It felt 0:07:26.480 --> 0:07:28.800 a little When I looked at it more closely, you 0:07:28.840 --> 0:07:31.440 could see some things that felt a little inhuman. 0:07:31.560 --> 0:07:35.320 I guess, hmmm, See that's tough because I've definitely pitched 0:07:35.320 --> 0:07:39.520 things that I've used language like that. No, totally, like 0:07:39.560 --> 0:07:42.280 that's what you do, Like you tell, hey, I'd like 0:07:42.400 --> 0:07:45.080 to write this, and it's timely because this is happening. 0:07:45.080 --> 0:07:47.400 It's the anniversary of whatever. We should revisit this. 0:07:47.720 --> 0:07:50.840 Yeah, no, all the telles for chat GPT or whatever. 0:07:50.960 --> 0:07:53.040 Like people say looking for M dashes and I'm so 0:07:53.080 --> 0:07:55.000 resentful of that. I use M dashes all the time, 0:07:55.120 --> 0:07:58.520 like it's same. So I don't know, I don't have 0:07:58.560 --> 0:08:01.400 a good way of spawning something. But the made up 0:08:01.480 --> 0:08:04.320 quotes and the kind of made up bylines made me 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:05.480 think this is what was happening. 0:08:06.240 --> 0:08:09.400 So okay, you're starting to think that this is AI. 0:08:09.960 --> 0:08:10.800 What do you do next? 0:08:11.440 --> 0:08:13.560 Then I just got really curious, right, Like, it's clear 0:08:13.600 --> 0:08:15.239 that this was a fake pitch, but like, what about 0:08:15.240 --> 0:08:18.440 all of those other bylines, Like all those other stories. 0:08:18.520 --> 0:08:21.080 There's dozens of them across the Internet that she's written. 0:08:21.200 --> 0:08:23.360 Like if she was faking stuff in this pitch for 0:08:23.440 --> 0:08:26.400 us so blatantly, what about those stories? 0:08:28.760 --> 0:08:32.040 So Nick started looking at Victoria Goldie's previous body of 0:08:32.120 --> 0:08:36.120 work and he kind of got obsessed, and that obsession 0:08:36.720 --> 0:08:41.640 led him to some pretty weird discoveries. That's after the break. 0:08:52.920 --> 0:08:55.680 After Nick puts together that Victoria seems to have not 0:08:55.760 --> 0:08:59.240 only chat GPT or pitch, but also lied about working 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:02.480 on other Canadians publications, he decides that he needs to 0:09:02.520 --> 0:09:05.880 figure out how far this rabbit hole goes. He's pretty 0:09:05.960 --> 0:09:11.040 sure he's being laed to, but he's still curious. You 0:09:11.080 --> 0:09:12.839 didn't confront her immediately? 0:09:13.520 --> 0:09:15.800 No, I wanted to know a little more, did. I 0:09:15.800 --> 0:09:17.959 did send some follow up emails. I said, like, did 0:09:17.960 --> 0:09:19.679 you actually speak with these people? And she said yes, 0:09:19.720 --> 0:09:21.400 I did. I said, are you based in Toronto because 0:09:21.400 --> 0:09:23.640 we need local reporting? She said, yeah, absolutely and based 0:09:23.640 --> 0:09:27.199 in Toronto. So the kind of like I understood the 0:09:27.280 --> 0:09:29.000 level of deception that was going on. I guess I 0:09:29.080 --> 0:09:31.640 understood that she was making stuff up. So when I 0:09:31.720 --> 0:09:35.080 started looking into the work that she'd published, the first 0:09:35.080 --> 0:09:37.520 one I looked at was this feature from the Journal 0:09:37.720 --> 0:09:40.280 of the Law Society of Scotland, which is like an 0:09:40.320 --> 0:09:43.320 in depth feature that was about law firms disappearing from 0:09:43.960 --> 0:09:46.680 the Scottish Highlands and like what were rural people doing? 0:09:46.720 --> 0:09:49.120 And I quoted like members of parliament, I quoted a 0:09:49.120 --> 0:09:52.080 bunch of lawyers, academics, and then a bunch of regular people. 0:09:52.200 --> 0:09:54.520 So I was just wondering, like, this is a real article. 0:09:54.960 --> 0:09:56.760 I couldn't find any of the regular people, you know, 0:09:56.760 --> 0:10:00.320 when she begins an anecdote, like Fiona forty to a 0:10:00.320 --> 0:10:05.160 school teacher in Glengarry or whatever, like those people google them, 0:10:05.200 --> 0:10:07.400 can find any of them. So then I emailed the 0:10:07.440 --> 0:10:09.480 people that she spoke to who were real, like a 0:10:09.520 --> 0:10:12.600 professor called Elaine Sutherland who she quoted in that piece. 0:10:12.640 --> 0:10:14.040 And I just emailed and said, did you speak to 0:10:14.040 --> 0:10:17.800 this writer? And she said no, absolutely not. But what's 0:10:17.840 --> 0:10:19.960 weird is that this sounds like the kind of thing 0:10:19.960 --> 0:10:22.280 I would say, wow, And this is the response that 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:24.959 I was getting in a lot of places, and I 0:10:25.000 --> 0:10:26.880 don't know, it's one of the eerier things. Right. It's 0:10:26.880 --> 0:10:29.280 not someone just making stuff up, but it is, I 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:33.559 believe AI searching through the internet thinking who is the 0:10:33.679 --> 0:10:36.760 likely person who can talk about Scottish law firms disappearing 0:10:36.760 --> 0:10:39.000 from the Highlands, you find someone who maybe has spoken 0:10:39.040 --> 0:10:40.800 too that in the past, or written a research paper 0:10:40.800 --> 0:10:43.160 about it, or whatever it is, and then kind of 0:10:43.280 --> 0:10:46.960 invents quotes that sound kind of like in the ballpark 0:10:47.000 --> 0:10:48.640 of what you might say. So that was the first 0:10:48.679 --> 0:10:51.280 piece that I thought, Okay, this is a made up story, 0:10:51.440 --> 0:10:53.320 and then I just kept looking. There were more. There 0:10:53.360 --> 0:10:57.000 was a story in Dwell that quoted like ten prominent 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:00.800 international designers and architects, and I just started sending emails 0:11:00.840 --> 0:11:03.360 to all of them, and they had not spoken to 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:03.840 this person. 0:11:04.960 --> 0:11:08.679 Victoria had published work in The Guardian, in Business Insider, 0:11:09.000 --> 0:11:13.600 New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Africa, Vogue, Philippines. I could 0:11:13.640 --> 0:11:16.800 keep going here. This is a resume that almost any 0:11:16.840 --> 0:11:19.120 freelance journalists would be really jealous of. 0:11:19.760 --> 0:11:21.800 How many articles should you have out there? I think 0:11:21.840 --> 0:11:23.600 over two dozen. I think I've got a spreadsheet of 0:11:23.679 --> 0:11:26.160 over two dozen articles. You made a spreadsheet I got, 0:11:26.200 --> 0:11:29.080 I got obsessed. I don't know I was not gonna 0:11:29.080 --> 0:11:31.120 write about this. We're a local publication that only reads 0:11:31.120 --> 0:11:32.800 about Toronto, right, I was just doing this set of 0:11:32.880 --> 0:11:35.720 curiosity to begin with. But I don't know, it just 0:11:35.720 --> 0:11:38.720 seems so wild to me that this stuff was out there. 0:11:38.840 --> 0:11:42.200 And maybe it sound like overly, you know, people are 0:11:42.280 --> 0:11:45.120 lying on the internet, but I found it shocking. I guess, 0:11:45.920 --> 0:11:48.400 how dare somebody lie on the internet. Yeah, yeah, but 0:11:48.480 --> 0:11:50.800 I lie on the Internet under the guardian's name or whatever. 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:52.640 That is different. Yeah, that is different. 0:11:52.720 --> 0:11:55.280 Yeah, getting on there and saying, hey, yo, I don't know, 0:11:55.320 --> 0:11:58.800 somebody like lying on their dating profile. Yo, I'm six 0:11:58.840 --> 0:12:00.880 foot two and like, bro, you're five to three. 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:01.480 Like okay. 0:12:01.480 --> 0:12:04.480 Maybe not a nice thing to do, but also very 0:12:04.480 --> 0:12:08.000 different from fooling the public into thinking that something happened. 0:12:08.120 --> 0:12:10.320 And some people said some things that they actually never did. 0:12:10.600 --> 0:12:11.240 Yeah. 0:12:11.440 --> 0:12:14.480 So one place that had published Victoria's work had actually 0:12:14.520 --> 0:12:17.280 already taken some stuff down, but they didn't say it 0:12:17.320 --> 0:12:18.120 was because of AI. 0:12:19.040 --> 0:12:22.280 I emailed with editors of other publications and spoke to 0:12:22.320 --> 0:12:25.120 a former editor at Pop Sugar, which had taken down 0:12:25.200 --> 0:12:28.520 a number of articles that she'd written. So I went 0:12:28.559 --> 0:12:30.520 online and it said that was taken down because there 0:12:30.559 --> 0:12:33.840 inconsistencies or didn't live up to Pop Sugar standards. The 0:12:34.000 --> 0:12:37.000 editor said that there were plagiarism issues with the stories. 0:12:37.880 --> 0:12:41.080 So walk me through this, Like, what were you feeling 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:42.000 at this time? 0:12:42.840 --> 0:12:45.280 I felt embarrassed to begin with. I think the pitch 0:12:45.280 --> 0:12:48.160 call was I said something about like the ways that 0:12:48.679 --> 0:12:51.720 health and money collide and twenty twenty five and Ontario 0:12:51.800 --> 0:12:53.920 something like that, and it felt to me like the 0:12:53.920 --> 0:12:57.520 pitches were some large language model taken that little prompt 0:12:57.600 --> 0:12:59.880 and sending me back like what I wanted to hear. 0:13:00.040 --> 0:13:01.640 And of course I was like, oh, yeah, I'm into this, 0:13:01.640 --> 0:13:03.559 this makes sense. This is all about how health and 0:13:03.600 --> 0:13:06.280 money collide in twenty twenty five, Like I was. Yeah, 0:13:06.320 --> 0:13:08.840 I was embarrassed at being kind of like sent back 0:13:08.920 --> 0:13:11.760 my own prompt in a way that felt like it 0:13:11.800 --> 0:13:14.079 was just designed to appeal to me. And I got 0:13:14.080 --> 0:13:16.839 fooled right as I moved through it, though, like I 0:13:16.880 --> 0:13:20.360 don't know, I began to feel maybe it sounds overblown, 0:13:20.400 --> 0:13:22.840 but like a sense of despair, Like at a certain point, 0:13:22.920 --> 0:13:25.560 I'm tracking down all this stuff she's telling lies all 0:13:25.600 --> 0:13:27.840 over the place. I go back to my inbox, which 0:13:27.840 --> 0:13:30.120 still has a million pitches, and I'm going through it 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:33.280 and I'm seeing the ones that look so synthetic. So 0:13:33.360 --> 0:13:36.280 AI and I started idly googling some of those authors, 0:13:36.280 --> 0:13:39.360 and I see that they have places across the internet 0:13:39.360 --> 0:13:41.880 as well. And I'm not going to do a deep 0:13:41.920 --> 0:13:44.640 dive on every single freelancer that ends up in my inbox, 0:13:44.720 --> 0:13:46.960 but like, how much of this stuff is out there? 0:13:47.120 --> 0:13:49.160 Like how much of I don't know? 0:13:49.200 --> 0:13:49.640 You know that? 0:13:50.040 --> 0:13:51.959 That was depressing to me. I spent my whole life 0:13:51.960 --> 0:13:55.520 writing journalism, and this feeling of this just being the 0:13:55.559 --> 0:13:59.880 tip of a pretty like awful iceberg was dispiriting. 0:14:00.080 --> 0:14:00.360 Guess. 0:14:01.280 --> 0:14:05.520 After investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers. 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:10.520 He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria. 0:14:10.600 --> 0:14:13.000 I wanted to talk to her. I had like so 0:14:13.120 --> 0:14:17.640 many questions about who this person really is, Like I 0:14:17.679 --> 0:14:20.680 as I'm in this world, I'm reading their writing right, 0:14:20.720 --> 0:14:22.920 and I'm and some of its first person stuff, and 0:14:23.080 --> 0:14:26.000 it's all obviously all a mix of true and false 0:14:26.240 --> 0:14:28.760 or completely false. I'm trying to figure out where they are. 0:14:28.920 --> 0:14:31.120 It feels like from some other earlier writing and some 0:14:31.160 --> 0:14:34.040 other social media that they're they may be based in Nigeria, 0:14:34.120 --> 0:14:36.760 or at least or from Nigeria. I said, a ton 0:14:36.760 --> 0:14:39.160 of questions for this person, so I wanted to get 0:14:39.200 --> 0:14:40.800 them on the phone. So I so I did that, 0:14:40.840 --> 0:14:43.120 emailed and said, let's let's chat about this piece. 0:14:43.480 --> 0:14:46.480 Nick emails Victoria asking if he can talk more about 0:14:46.520 --> 0:14:50.360 her article. From a freelancers standpoint, and initial check in 0:14:50.440 --> 0:14:53.600 call is a pretty normal next step toward officially being 0:14:53.640 --> 0:14:58.080 accepted and being paid. So Victoria agreed to a video 0:14:58.160 --> 0:15:00.280 call and they set it up for later that week. 0:15:02.400 --> 0:15:04.760 In the ten minutes before that was about to start, 0:15:04.960 --> 0:15:07.720 they emailed and said, I think I have internet connections. 0:15:07.760 --> 0:15:10.280 Let's do this over audio. And then I got them 0:15:10.280 --> 0:15:12.720 over the phone. And it was a strange conversation. It 0:15:12.760 --> 0:15:14.800 was a it was a kind of surreal experience. 0:15:15.280 --> 0:15:15.920 What happened. 0:15:16.560 --> 0:15:20.160 So I guess in the fantasy version of this conversation 0:15:20.200 --> 0:15:22.640 that I had been trying to plan out was I 0:15:22.680 --> 0:15:26.000 would present them with some inconsistencies and they get bigger 0:15:26.040 --> 0:15:27.720 and bigger, and a certain point they would just have 0:15:27.760 --> 0:15:30.880 to admit these lies and then maybe we could actually 0:15:30.880 --> 0:15:32.280 talk about who they were, and you know, were they 0:15:32.280 --> 0:15:34.880 are real journalists who had gotten in over their heads. 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:37.240 Were they a scammer who had just like found some 0:15:37.280 --> 0:15:40.920 easy marks with like overworked editors. That was the like 0:15:41.240 --> 0:15:44.000 the unrealistic dream version of this conversation. How it actually 0:15:44.040 --> 0:15:47.000 happened was I got on the phone someone very chipper 0:15:47.040 --> 0:15:49.520 who send it to my ear like a young woman 0:15:49.560 --> 0:15:52.160 with an African accent was on the phone. I asked 0:15:52.200 --> 0:15:54.600 where she was based in Toronto, and she cheerfully said Bluer, 0:15:55.000 --> 0:15:56.840 which is like if you said, whereabouts do you live 0:15:56.880 --> 0:16:00.440 in New York and they just said Broadway right, okay, 0:16:00.800 --> 0:16:03.320 But you know, this person had had googled the street 0:16:03.320 --> 0:16:05.520 in Toronto, so I was I was already, you know, 0:16:05.760 --> 0:16:08.560 well done. Yeah, And then I kind of just walked 0:16:08.560 --> 0:16:11.200 them through some of the inconsistencies. And I didn't want 0:16:11.240 --> 0:16:13.360 to spook them necessarily. I didn't want them to hang 0:16:13.440 --> 0:16:15.200 up right away. So I asked them if they'd spoken 0:16:15.240 --> 0:16:17.520 to the doctor. In her pitch, she said yes, she had. 0:16:17.720 --> 0:16:19.320 I mentioned that, you know, we actually spoke to that 0:16:19.360 --> 0:16:21.800 doctor and she says, she didn't speak to you, and 0:16:21.840 --> 0:16:23.800 she said, oh, yes, of course, my personal assistant I 0:16:23.800 --> 0:16:27.080 actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact 0:16:27.080 --> 0:16:30.800 that like freelance journalists don't have personal assistance. I kind of, right, yeah, 0:16:31.440 --> 0:16:33.760 let that drift past. I asked why I couldn't find 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:36.320 the stories in the Walrus and the Globe and Mail, 0:16:36.640 --> 0:16:39.160 and she said most of those were done online only. 0:16:39.280 --> 0:16:41.080 I emailed the editors from the Globe and the Walrus 0:16:41.080 --> 0:16:42.920 and they said they've never worked with her. I asked 0:16:42.920 --> 0:16:44.840 if she just recently moved to Toronto, because it seemed 0:16:44.880 --> 0:16:46.880 like she was writing first person stories from London and 0:16:47.200 --> 0:16:49.400 other places, and she said, yeah, she just moved this year. 0:16:49.960 --> 0:16:51.840 I asked her why the stories were gone from Pop 0:16:51.880 --> 0:16:54.280 Sugar and she said, oh, the editor moved on from 0:16:54.320 --> 0:16:56.840 Pop Sugar, so they took down all the articles that 0:16:56.840 --> 0:16:59.600 they worked talking with me, which is not how is 0:16:59.600 --> 0:17:02.400 not how that works. Every question she just sort of answered, 0:17:02.480 --> 0:17:05.840 very cheerfully, very upbeat, didn't seem to be shaken by it. 0:17:06.000 --> 0:17:08.600 She had quick responses to every I mean, implausible, but 0:17:09.200 --> 0:17:11.920 quick and ready. It's almost impressive. And then I kind 0:17:11.920 --> 0:17:14.680 of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies. 0:17:14.760 --> 0:17:14.879 Right. 0:17:15.080 --> 0:17:18.119 I started talking about that story in the Scottish Journal. 0:17:18.480 --> 0:17:21.600 I said that she'd quoted this professor Elaine Sutherland. I said, 0:17:21.600 --> 0:17:23.919 I'd actually spoken to Elaine Sutherland, and she said she 0:17:23.960 --> 0:17:27.200 has never spoken to you. And I realized in the 0:17:27.240 --> 0:17:30.000 pause afterwards that she that she was gone, that she'd 0:17:30.080 --> 0:17:35.119 hung up. She's not responded to any email since. I've 0:17:35.200 --> 0:17:36.080 not heard from her since. 0:17:37.640 --> 0:17:40.360 And it looks like that last question did it for Victoria. 0:17:40.640 --> 0:17:44.240 She knew the jig was up, but Nick still wanted 0:17:44.280 --> 0:17:49.360 to find out who is Victoria Goldie. We'll get into 0:17:49.400 --> 0:18:06.720 that after the break. After that phone call, Victoria quietly 0:18:06.760 --> 0:18:08.440 removed herself from the Internet. 0:18:08.920 --> 0:18:11.199 In the days that followed, the x account that had 0:18:11.240 --> 0:18:15.160 been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her mockrack page, 0:18:15.160 --> 0:18:17.760 which is kind of a list of all a journalists 0:18:17.960 --> 0:18:22.679 stories that went private. Her personal website went down. She 0:18:22.760 --> 0:18:26.280 kind of disappeared after that phone call, and I say, 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:29.080 she I at this point, I don't not know who 0:18:29.400 --> 0:18:33.720 who like Victoria Goldie is. The evidence suggests that this 0:18:33.800 --> 0:18:37.159 person is either from or still lives in Nigeria. I 0:18:37.200 --> 0:18:41.119 don't think it's a whole farm of people working together 0:18:41.400 --> 0:18:44.480 and sending out stuff under one byline, although it could 0:18:44.520 --> 0:18:46.679 be that. Something that crossed my mind a lot for 0:18:46.720 --> 0:18:49.520 a while, I thought maybe there's no singular person attached 0:18:49.520 --> 0:18:51.320 to this name at all. Maybe it's just, you know, 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:53.600 one of a dozen bylines that people are using to 0:18:54.040 --> 0:18:56.640 get paid for some writing. I don't think that's the case. 0:18:56.680 --> 0:18:59.440 That one of the earliest stories I found under that byline, 0:18:59.520 --> 0:19:01.880 it was a couple months before Chatgebet came out, which 0:19:01.920 --> 0:19:04.600 is kind of the demarketing line I think, after which 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:07.320 like you can't trust that a sentence was written by 0:19:07.359 --> 0:19:09.920 a human, And it was like it felt different. Those 0:19:09.960 --> 0:19:13.800 early stories were there's some grammatical mistakes, they're clumsier, they're 0:19:13.840 --> 0:19:16.919 less smooth, less slick, but they seem to represent like 0:19:17.040 --> 0:19:19.720 a real person talking about real things. 0:19:20.320 --> 0:19:23.160 One article from that pre chatgpt era is from May 0:19:23.160 --> 0:19:26.360 of twenty twenty two. It's a piece that Victoria Goldie 0:19:26.400 --> 0:19:29.439 wrote for a website called black Ballad with the title 0:19:29.720 --> 0:19:33.480 how I'm learning to navigate toxic positivity on social media, 0:19:34.080 --> 0:19:37.479 And there's this line where she writes, quote, there's this 0:19:37.600 --> 0:19:41.080 immense pressure to be productive. Most people like me are 0:19:41.160 --> 0:19:43.680 tired and trying to survive day to day. 0:19:44.520 --> 0:19:47.159 So I think this is a real individual. This is 0:19:47.200 --> 0:19:50.240 not their name necessarily, but I think this is one individual. 0:19:50.240 --> 0:19:52.320 And you see a kind of continuity of interest throughout 0:19:52.320 --> 0:19:56.040 their into key dramas, they're into afrobeats. There's some continuity 0:19:56.080 --> 0:19:58.800 of which feels like a person there. I can't know 0:19:58.880 --> 0:20:01.040 for sure, but I think this as an individual who, 0:20:01.119 --> 0:20:03.440 at least in those early stories, is writing about going 0:20:03.480 --> 0:20:06.520 online like the rest of us and making her miserable 0:20:06.800 --> 0:20:09.840 seeing people who are presenting themselves as doing so well, 0:20:09.960 --> 0:20:12.920 seeing all this hustle culture and they're just struggling to 0:20:12.920 --> 0:20:13.800 get by a day to day. 0:20:15.160 --> 0:20:18.760 So in the beginning she was writing about going online 0:20:18.760 --> 0:20:22.520 seeing hustle culture, getting kind of depressed. And that's what 0:20:22.560 --> 0:20:25.600 the hustle culture Rose is selling you right now, is hey, 0:20:25.720 --> 0:20:27.639 here's how to make a bunch of money by cranking 0:20:27.680 --> 0:20:32.360 out content with AI. So kind of can't beat them, 0:20:32.800 --> 0:20:33.720