The Talented Ms. Goldiee

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Question Everything"

Episode: The Talented Ms. Goldiee

Host: Brian Reed
Date: March 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, host Brian Reed investigates the enigmatic figure of “Victoria Goldiee,” a prolific freelance journalist whose reporting credentials and stories unravel into a web of deception, questionable ethics, and possible generative AI trickery. Through editor Nicholas Hune Brown’s first-hand account, the episode delves into the fallout for journalism when fact-checking falters, AI-generated pitches slip through editorial gates, and the boundary between truth-telling and fabrication all but evaporates in a fragmented media ecosystem.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Suspicious Pitch and the Rise of “Victoria Goldiee”

• Initial Attraction: Nicholas Hune Brown, editor at The Local in Toronto, describes his excitement at a strong pitch about "membership medicine" in Canadian healthcare.
  • “I got a pitch from a new writer that seemed promising. She had a memorable name, Victoria Goldie, spelled G O L D I E E... The Netflix comparison was fun. The analysis seemed sound and the rest of the writing was sharp.” (02:01)
• Red Flags: Detailed, pre-reported interviews stood out, but so did inconsistencies in Goldiee’s background.
  • “As I thought more about it, that jumped out as a red flag. I’ve freelanced a lot in the past, and I know from experience that doing so many interviews before officially getting hired is a big gambler.” (03:49)

2. The Investigation Begins

• Background Checks: Hune Brown’s attempts to verify Victoria’s credentials reveal troubling inconsistencies—stories supposedly published in prominent Canadian outlets simply don't exist.
  • “I googled her name along with the names of the Canadian publications she said she'd written for. Nothing came up. It appeared she hadn't written for any of those places.” (04:46)
• Dubious Quotes: Direct outreach to supposed sources yields denials—people quoted in pitches never spoke to Victoria Goldiee.
  • “I had one of my colleagues reach out to Danielle Martin, the doctor Victoria claimed she'd interviewed. Dr. Martin said she'd never heard of Victoria.” (05:09)
• AI Suspicions: The pitch text matches typical AI-generated phrasing, raising concerns about the authenticity not just of the sources but the writing itself.
  • “The pitch had wrote phrasing like this story matters because of X, it is timely because of Y. It fits your readership because of Z—hallmarks of an AI generated piece of writing.” (05:41)

3. A Pattern Across Publications

• Prolific Output, Vanishing Articles: Hune Brown tracks Victoria’s byline across outlets: Business Insider, Vox, Dwell, Rolling Stone Africa, the Strategist, and more, only to see articles taken down for not meeting “editorial standards.”
  • “Victoria Goldie has been attached to dozens of articles... when I tried to read them, they'd been taken down and replaced by a note that says... 'did not meet our editorial standards,' a phrase I would come across a lot.“ (07:06)
• Editorial Lapses: Editors recall liking her pitches, but after-the-fact realize plagiarism and fake quotes were rampant.
  • Quote from former editor Nancy Einhardt (paraphrased): "She is clearly on a pitch tour." (08:20)

4. An Uncaring Information Ecosystem

• Sources Unconcerned by Fabrication: One purported source, presented with a fabricated quote, shrugs off the deception because "it sounds like something I would say."
  • “The material attributed to me sounds exactly like something that I would say, and I'm fine with that material being out there. That blew my mind.” (10:49)
• Media’s Weaknesses Exposed: Hune Brown reflects on how easy it was for these lies to proliferate unchecked.
  • “These lies bugged me. Not so much on Victoria's end—scammers will scam—but on the editorial side, on how simple it had been for such easily debunked lies to slide their way into respected publications.” (11:44)

5. The Interview with “Victoria Goldiee”

• Awkward Live Call: Hune Brown, after extensive research, gets on a phone call with Victoria, who evades video, offers generic answers, and defends implausible claims (e.g., having a personal assistant as a freelancer).
  • “The idea of a freelance writer with a personal assistant is ridiculous, of course, but I pushed on.” (16:26)
• Confrontation and Disappearance: When directly challenged with evidence that her sources deny speaking with her, Victoria abruptly hangs up and then vanishes from the internet.
  • “In my fantasy version of this phone call... Victoria would be forced to admit... Instead—Victoria had hung up.” (19:27)
  • “In the days and weeks after our phone call, Victoria seemed to disappear from the Internet. Her online writer's portfolio, gone. Her Muckrack page... went too.” (20:10)

6. Wider Ramifications for Journalism

• AI-Generated Fakery is Everywhere: Examples abound—Chicago Sun Times published a fake, AI-generated reading list; other outlets were scammed by similar operators.
  • “Earlier this year, at least six publications, including Wired, removed stories after it was discovered that the articles allegedly written by a freelancer named Margot Blanchard were likely AI inventions.” (22:44)
• Systemic Weakness and Despair: Editors are overwhelmed, fact-checking is rare, and freelance journalism faces both technological and economic challenges, making the field ripe for exploitation.
  • “Freelance journalism today is an underpaid, precarious, impossible place to build a career. But it turns out it's a decent enough arena for a scam.” (23:36)
  • “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.” (24:53)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On being duped by AI pipelining:
  • “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.” — Nicholas Hune Brown (05:50)
• Editorial candidness:
  • “She is clearly on a pitch tour.” — Nancy Einhardt, former PS editor (08:20)
• AI-era indifference:
  • “The material attributed to me sounds exactly like something that I would say, and I'm fine with that material being out there.” — Anonymous architect, quoted by Victoria Goldiee (10:52)
• The bone-deep editorial fatigue:
  • “I idly googled the authors of a few of the pitches that looked most blatantly written by AI... I was struck by a brief but genuine moment of bone deep despair. Then I closed my laptop.” — Nicholas Hune Brown (25:26)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:18–04:35]: Hune Brown explains his pitch process and the initial allure (and first doubts) regarding Victoria Goldiee’s pitch.
• [04:35–08:20]: The investigation into fake credentials and fabricated sourcing.
• [09:00–11:40]: Realization that much of Victoria’s writing (and many quotes) were AI-generated; reaction from quoted “sources.”
• [14:07–17:27]: The phone interview with Victoria Goldiee, including ambiguous and evasive answers.
• [19:20–20:45]: Confrontation about faked quotes; Victoria hangs up and later disappears from the web.
• [22:44–25:37]: Discussion of broader editorial failures, emergence of other AI-linked journalistic scams, and the present-day media climate.

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains a tone oscillating between journalistic curiosity, genuine frustration, and a certain existential despair at the current state of freelance reporting. It is candid, often reflective, with moments of both dry humor and hard-hitting critique.

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Summary Conclusion

“The Talented Ms. Goldiee” exposes how digital tools, AI, and economic desperation converge to erode the line between fiction and fact in journalism—a poignant warning from inside the fraying world of media, and a sobering look at what happens when editorial gatekeeping breaks down.

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Transcript

[A]

From KCRW and Placement Theory, this is Question Everything. I'm Brian Reed. Today on our show, an editor confronts a writer who he suspects of trickery.

[B]

I saw that you had a couple of pieces in Popsugar that I was trying to read, but I think they'd been removed. Do you have any idea what was going on there?

[C]

The editor who published the story and left the publication.

[A]

Stick around. A little while back, I got connected with a journalist who'd found himself embroiled in a bit of a mystery. Nicholas Hune Brown is an editor at an online magazine based in Toronto called the Local. Does lots of local coverage to Toronto. Not long before we were put in touch, Nick had put out a call for pitches from freelancers, which is something he loved to do as an editor. Welcome new writers into the fold, give them a platform. And Nick got what he was looking for. A pitch came in from a journalist in Toronto that sounded great at first, but then as he looked deeper at it and the journalists behind it, Nick began to suspect that this writer might not be who she seemed. As he told us when we got put in touch, he soon became obsessed with this writer and finding out everything he could about her. Here's Nick.

[B]

Looking for new writers is an important part of my job. I want to bring in new people with new points of view, young writers or people from communities who aren't always represented in the media. That's not out of any vague, high minded idea about diversity. It's good for the magazine. It's how we find stories that others don't. It helped us win awards for our tiny newsroom, punching way above our weight. A few months ago, in September, we put a call out for stories about healthcare privatization, which has become a fraught topic in Canada. And I got a pitch from a new writer that seemed promising. She had a memorable name, Victoria Goldie, spelled G O L D I E E. Victoria's pitch was about the rise of what she called membership medicine. Healthcare is free here, but new companies were popping up, charging monthly subscription fees and promising to help you skip the line. Victoria was going to talk to the people using those services and talked to the people angry about being pushed to the back of the line. It was a story about a trend, she said, that could transform Canada's universal healthcare system into something resembling Netflix or Amazon Prime. I liked it. The Netflix comparison was fun. The analysis seemed sound and the rest of the writing was sharp. She said she'd written for the Globe and Mail, the Walrus and Maisonneuve, Canadian outlets that publish the same kind of feature writing we do. Most impressively. She'd already done a lot of the reporting. Victoria said she'd interviewed a consultant in Vancouver and a 58 year old construction worker in Hamilton, Ontario. She had a great quote from a prominent Toronto physician, Danielle Martin, who said, membership medicine is a creeping form of privatization. When I googled Victoria, the author headshot that came up was of a youthful black woman. According to her bio, she was a writer with a keen focus on sharing the untold stories of underrepresented communities in the media. And I saw that she had bylines at across a whole range of publications. Victoria had written short pieces in the Cut and the Guardian. There were longer, more serious features in publications like the nonprofit Outrider and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. The overall impression from her publication history was ambitious. Young freelancer on the rise. I was sold. I brought her pitch to the next editorial story meeting. We'd received similar pitches before, but no one had done all the legwork Victoria had. Plus, like I said, we're always eager to try out new people. We decided to assign the story. When I got home from the office that evening, I took a final look at her pitch. But reading it this time, an eerie feeling came over me. The slick pitch suddenly seemed a little too slick. Minor questions I may have brushed aside earlier, eager to just get the story assigned now gnawed at me. First of all, lots of Victoria's bylines were in New York magazines and British newspapers. Was she actually in Toronto? Earlier, I'd been impressed that she'd done so much reporting already, even interviewing local construction workers. But as I thought more about it, that jumped out as a red flag. I've freelanced a lot in the past, and I know from experience that doing so many interviews before officially getting hired is a big gambler.

[A]

Now.

[B]

I felt like I might be taking a gamble if I commissioned this story from Victoria before signing a contract. I needed to find out more. I'd already read some of her work in the US but now I wanted to see what her Canadian reporting was like. I googled her name along with the names of the Canadian publications she said she'd written for. Nothing came up. It appeared she hadn't written for any of those places. I had one of my colleagues reach out to Danielle Martin, the doctor Victoria claimed she'd interviewed. Dr. Martin said she'd never heard of Victoria. I had a feeling of vertigo, of putting my foot onto what should have been solid ground and finding nothing but air. I emailed Victoria back and asked if those quotes were from her own interviews and if she'd sent along the stories she'd written for the Walrus and Mesonove. She sent a lengthy reply the next day. The quotes I included in the pitch are from original interviews I've conducted over the past few weeks. In terms of previous work, I read a regular newsletter for the Walrus, which gives a good sense of my ability to balance accessibility with depth while speaking to a broad audience. She attached a link to the Walrus Lab Insider newsletter. It had someone else's byline, So I emailed the Walrus. An editor wrote back to say that Victoria had never written that newsletter, and she found it odd that Victoria would say that she did. I re read Victoria's stilted email. Then I re read her original pitch, and I saw what should have been clear from the start. The pitch head wrote phrasing like this story matters because of X, it is timely because of Y. It fits your readership because of Z Hallmarks of an AI generated piece of writing. I was embarrassed. 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, I could see now that the reason I'd liked the pitch to begin with was probably because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own carefully crafted prompt and giving me precisely what I was asking for. I'd put out a call for pitches about healthcare privatization stories where health and money collide, and Victoria, I presumed, had put my words into a chatbot and told it to create a strong pitch that responded to my request. The AI was just flattering me something it's good at by sending me back what I wanted to hear. I probably should have ended things right there. Send her an email. Reject the pitch. Tell her I discovered that she'd made up quotes and never interviewed sources. But once I got over that initial embarrassment, I started to feel something else shock. The boldness of the lies astounded me. Why would a journalist with a successful freelance career take such wild risks to pitch a small publication across the world? Did she have an actual freelance career? Who was this person? Were they a person at all? Since 2022, the byline Victoria Goldie has been attached to dozens of articles. I found a handful of pieces in Business Insider where Victoria told the stories of everyday a Trader Joe's sign artist, an Amazon delivery driver who loved his job, an actor who got leg lengthening surgery. There was an interview Victoria did with actor Nico Santos in Vogue Philippines, a feature on Afrobeats in Rolling Stone, Africa, and a product recommendation for a DVD drive in New York magazine's the Strategist. At this point, I didn't plan to write about this strange freelancer who I was pretty sure had tried to scam us. But I gotta admit, I was curious if she was making up interviews in her pitches. What else was she doing in these dozens of stories she'd published in reputable outlets around the world? I couldn't let it go. In my spare time, I found myself creating a timeline of every single article published under the byline Victoria Goldie since 2022. Like a 2024 digital story about climate change memes, that piece quotes Juliet Pinto, a professor at Penn State. I decided to email Professor Pinto. This is a strange question out of the blue, I wrote. But had she ever spoken with a journalist named Victoria Goldie? I sent Pinto a link to the piece where she was quoted talking about her research. She wrote back immediately, I have not spoken with any reporter about that piece of research. Victoria had written a couple of stories for Vox Media publication PS formerly known as Popsugar, but when I tried to read them, they'd been taken down and replaced by a note that says the stories quote did not meet our editorial standards, a phrase I would come across a lot. As I followed the digital breadcrumbs Victoria Goldie left behind, I wrote to a former PS editor named Nancy Einhardt to ask what had happened. She said she remembered Victoria's pieces borrowing too heavily from articles published elsewhere. She also told me that she felt disappointed because she'd really liked Victoria's pitches. She added that I was the third editor to contact her about Victoria in the past couple of months. She is clearly on a pitch tour, nancy wrote. I started to wonder, how prolific was this person? In October, after I'd already been digging into her work for a couple of weeks, I woke up to find a new Victoria Goldie story online in the design publication Dwell with the headline how to turn your home's neglected corners into design gold. It featured a series of quotes from well known international designers and architects from Japan to England to California. The most cursory read raised questions that probably should have been asked by editors to begin with. Namely, had a freelancer writing an article whose only purpose was to get readers to buy some lamps actually interviewed 10 of the world's top designers and architects? She hadn't. I emailed them. A bunch of them responded to say they'd never heard of Victoria Goldie. But one architect quoted in that piece was more careful in her response. She told me she didn't remember speaking with Victoria, and there was no sign of her in her inbox. But she couldn't be 100% sure. Either way, she wasn't particularly concerned by her appearance in the article she wrote. The material attributed to me sounds exactly like something that I would say, and I'm fine with that material being out there. That blew my mind. In this current AI age, I could accept that readers might not really care if stories were being made up, but it never occurred to me that the people being lied about might not be bothered. What does it say about journalism, where we're constantly working our asses off to make sure every I is dotted and T is crossed that a source actually doesn't care if a machine made up a quote for her, as long as it sounds mostly right? And while up to now, digging into Victoria's old stories had felt like a kind of fun puzzle, for some reason, seeing this fresh new story on the Internet felt different. Oh, my God. Victoria can't be stopped. I messaged my colleagues sharing a link to the piece. She was out there at this very minute preparing a new, increasingly brazen fake story. And some editor was probably out there too, getting ready to publish it. I don't want to sound naive. I am aware that people lie on the Internet. But these lies bugged me. Not so much on Victoria's end scammers will scam, but on the editorial side, on how simple it had been for such easily debunked lies to slide their way into respected publications. Like, was anyone out there even editing these stories? Plus, let's be honest, I'm a journalist. If a mysterious person in some mysterious location was printing AI slop in publications around the world under the noses of her editors about such an impressive variety of topics, that was a story I wanted to tell. That's how I ended up on the phone with Victoria.

[C]

Hi, Vinique. So nice to meet you.

[B]

Hey, Victoria. How are you doing?

[C]

I'm fine.

[B]

That's after a quick break. Hey, y'.

[C]

All.

[B]

Each week on the Sam Sanders show from kcrw, we ask big questions and share hot takes about the pop culture we love. Now that we have YouTube, we don't need any more biopics.

[C]

If they've been alive such that I

[A]

can watch them on YouTube, I don't need it.

[B]

I don't think that music is getting worse.

[A]

I think y' all just don't listen to artists who aren't in the mainstream.

[C]

Taylor Swift retire.

[B]

It's time to retire the Sam Sanders show from KCRW, wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. Two weeks after she'd first pitched me, and after spending far too many hours trailing the path she'd cut through the Internet, I emailed Victoria Goldie asking if we could talk about her pitch. I'd spent days reading everything Victoria had ever written on the Internet. Now I wanted to know who she actually was, and I planned to write about it for the local I set up a video call for later that week. Ten minutes before it was set to begin, she emailed to change plans. I look forward to chatting in a bit. I'll be joining via phone, so it'll be a voice call in my end. Convenient, I thought. Moments later, she was on the line, chipper and friendly. Hey Victoria, how you doing?

[C]

I'm fine.

[B]

I'll turn my camera off as well since you're on the phone. How's your day going so far? I had so many questions. Was the person on the line even the same person whose writing I'd been reading? Where did she actually live? Did she even care about the corners of a living room? Mostly I wanted to know why she was doing this. Was she a writer with genuine ambitions who had gotten in way over her head and was now taking some truly outrageous risks? I was ready to be sympathetic. Or was she a simple scammer who'd found easy marks in the overworked editors of the journalism world? But I knew I had to tread lightly. So whereabouts in Toronto are you? I started with the basics. Whereabouts in Toronto are you?

[C]

Blois and Blois Street.

[B]

Okay, nice. That's one of the city's busiest commercial streets. It would be like if I asked someone in New York City where they lived and they just responded Broadway. I'll admit I was nervous. I did my best to sound casual and not like I just spent weeks thinking about this person. I've never interviewed anyone I so desperately wanted to hear the truth from. I had some questions, more questions about the piece and how you want to move forward with it. Okay, first of all, tell me about how you envision the rest of the reporting process going.

[C]

Okay, so the piece basically is about how there's been like a quiet but significant shift towards privatized, like subscriptions to style health care models. It's basically like membership.

[B]

She talked her way through the story using more or less the same language as the pitch, as if paraphrasing a document in front of her.

[C]

More people like Canadians are paying for, like, healthcare as kind of their own version of Netflix or Amazon. Kind of how we pay monthly subscriptions for Netflix now. Healthcare is the same way.

[B]

I asked her about the interviews. She said she'd already done. Is it right that you've done some of those pre interviews already?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, just a few, but I have a list of sources I want to get in touch with.

[B]

Yeah. And you said you spoke with Danielle Martin, is that right? Yes, yes, we actually. I know her, or we know her at the local. And she said she doesn't remember speaking with you. Did you actually talk with her?

[C]

Oh, yeah, I did. I did have my personal assistant talk to her.

[B]

Okay. Okay. The idea of a freelance writer with a personal assistant is ridiculous, of course, but I pushed on. I didn't want to spook her off the phone. So, yeah, I was looking for some of those clippings because I wanted to see what your past work was like. And I saw that you cover, like,

[C]

different things, not just, like, one topic. I covered multiple stories.

[B]

If the person on the other end of the line was put off by my questioning, she didn't show it. Victoria stayed cheery and upbeat, providing quick, if implausible answers to everything. You mentioned you've done work for the Walrus and Maisonov and the Globe, but I couldn't find those clips. I don't know. Is there what?

[C]

Most of them are in print.

[B]

What's that?

[C]

I said most of them are in print. I forgot to send.

[B]

Most of the stories are in print. Victoria told me, but editors from the Globe and Mail, Mezanove and the Walrus told me they do not believe Victoria Goldie has ever written for those publications. I saw that you had a couple of pieces in Popsugar that I was trying to read, but I think they'd been removed with a note that said they didn't meet publication standards. Do you have any idea what was going on there?

[C]

I think the editor who published the story left the publication. So that's why they deleted all of the pieces that she covered?

[B]

Yeah. Okay. The phone line makes it a little hard to hear, but she said they deleted the pieces because the editor she worked with had left the publication. Such quick answers to everything. Obviously, publications don't take down pieces because an editor leaves. She was lying to me, and I was pretending not to notice. She was lying to me. I don't think I've ever spoken to someone who I suspected was lying to me. With each and every response, I wondered where she was based since her work referenced being in several different locations, like the US the uk, Even Nigeria. I saw that you've done some work in the uk. Did you come to Toronto recently? Were you in the UK before?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I did recently. Like this past year.

[B]

Okay, okay, got you. It was surreal because after spending weeks reading everything she'd ever published on the Internet, despite the lies, despite the fact that much of what I'd read was surely written by a machine, I still felt like I knew something about this person. I saw, or at least convinced myself, I saw the outlines of a real human being. She seemed to be from Nigeria, based on some of her earliest published writing. She was into afrobeats and loved Korean dramas. She wrote about them over and over. And with that image in my head of a K drama loving young woman emailing editors around the world from her apartment in Nigeria, I felt some sympathy for her. In my fantasy version of this phone call, after I gently led her toward more and more severe inconsistencies, Victoria would be forced to admit to the deceptions, and then we would really talk. I started looking at some other clippings of your work to kind of get a better sense of what you did. So I saw a piece that you did recently for the Law, the journal of the Law Society of Scotland, I think.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And another one about climate memes for Outrider. Yeah.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

So I was looking at some of the quotes within those stories and some of the people you spoke with. And for example, in the Law Society of Scotland piece, you quote this professor. Actually, I emailed and she said she never spoke with you. Victoria had hung up. I see now how foolish my fantasy had been. Whoever was on the other end of that line, caught in a nightmarish call that was transforming from a work chat into an audit of their entire professional life, was not going to somehow open up and offer a full explanation. I emailed her back immediately. Had the phone line just dropped? Did she want to jump on another call? No response. I messaged her later that day too, explaining that I really wanted to hear her perspective. Nothing. Eventually, before publishing the story I wrote about Victoria for my magazine, I sent a long note with every made up quote and inconsistency I'd found asking for her response. She's never emailed me back. In the days and weeks after our phone call, Victoria seemed to disappear from the Internet. Her online writer's portfolio, gone. Her Muckrack page, which is a listing of a journalist to publish works that went too. An X account with her handle that had shared previous stories, also vanished. And as I emailed the editors of various publications. One by one, Victoria's articles came down. The climate story at Outrider was replaced by a 404 error. A story she'd written for the Guardian came down with a note saying that it had been removed for editorial standards reasons. The story at Dwell was replaced with a similar note that ends with our apologies to our readers. And the sources previously cited within the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland also removed Goldie's article and published an apology to the Journal's readers. I asked each of these publications about their fact checking. How had Victoria's pieces made it through, and would this experience change anything in their editorial process? Only the editor in chief of the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland, Joshua King, answered my questions in an email. King explained that the quotes in the piece raised no red flags because they were, in all honesty, what I would have expected those quoted to have said. Sadly, I think editors and publications are at risk from bad actors. And he's right. One of the academics quoted in Victoria's Law Journal article told me herself that the fake quote sounded like the sort of thing she would say it was made up, but it reflected her real beliefs. Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. In the late 90s, a young journalist named Stephen Glass was caught fabricating sources at the New Republic. A few years later, journalist Jason Blair was caught doing the same at the New York Times. Those were major scandals. They caught the public imagination, stories about ambitious drivers trying to find a shortcut to the prestige and power that came with journalism in that era. This generation. Scammers, by contrast, are scavenging in the wreckage of a crumbling 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. Freelance journalism today is an underpaid, precarious, impossible 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. Victoria would have been paid about $800 for her Dwell story, 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. And Victoria Goldie isn't the only one who's figured that out. Last summer, the Chicago Sun Times accidentally published an AI generated summer reading list filled with books that didn't exist here in Toronto, an independent publication called the Grind 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 Margot Blanchard were likely AI inventions. The suspected fraud was only discovered after the editor of the independent publication Dispatch received a suspicious pitch and began digging into the writer's work. After weeks of trudging through Goldie'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 when we'd put out our call for pitches. Our hope was to bring new writers to our publication, but in a world where you don't know if the person sending the pitch had actually written it, I didn't know how to do that. Looking at the collection of ideas in my inbox now, 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. I idly googled the authors of a few of the pitches that looked most blatantly written by AI. I saw their bylines across the Internet, a web of lies and uncanny half truths entrenched so deeply in the information ecosystem that no one could possibly have the energy to dislodge them, and I was struck by a brief but genuine moment of bone deep despair. Then I closed my laptop.

[A]

That's Nicholas Hune Brown at the Local in Toronto. Thanks to Callie Anderson for connecting us with Nick, and thanks to Nick and the Local for letting us adapt this story. We'll link to the version Nick ran in the Local in the Show Notes. If you have a second, Please go to kcrw.com surveys and take the Question Everything survey. It takes just a couple minutes and helps us and KCRW know what you're getting out of the show, what you wish you were getting out of the show. We appreciate it. Also Our Newsletter? Everything.substack.com We've been doing a lot of coverage of the social media trials over there. Among other things, today's show was Produced by Zach St. Louis and edited by our managing editor, Kevin Sullivan and Neil Drumming. Robin Simin and I are the executive producers of Question Everything. Our team also includes producer Sophie Kazis, contributing producer Sam Egan, contributing editor Jen Kinney, and associate producer Kevin Shepard. This episode was fact checked by Kim Frida Mixing and sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. If you're interested in supporting Question Everything as a partner or a sponsor, please write [e-mail] our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Tejal Algemera, Natalie Hill, and Jennifer Farrow. We'll see you next week.

[C]

I just got my new phone and the KCRW app is the best way to get the music and shows you love from kcrw. And it's been totally redone to be cleaner, faster and more reliable. And there's two new music Dance 24 and Vintage 24 and they're only in the app plus real time now playing so you never miss a track ID. Look up KCRW in the App Store and be sure to make a free account to use all the new features.