Uncovering an AI Journalist

Summary

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Uncanny Valley | WIRED

Episode: Introducing Kill Switch Podcast: Uncovering an AI Journalist

Date: March 18, 2026
Host: Dexter Thomas (with guest Nicholas Hune Brown)
Featured Podcast: Kill Switch, produced by Kaleidoscope + iHeart

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Episode Overview

This episode of Uncanny Valley features a special crossover with Kill Switch, focusing on an unsettling phenomenon in journalism: the rise of fake reporters leveraging AI to infiltrate reputable publications. The episode follows journalist Nicholas Hune Brown’s investigation into “Victoria Goldie,” a supposed freelance reporter pitching and publishing stories at major outlets—only to reveal a web of AI-generated content, fake bylines, and fabricated sources. Through personal anecdotes, nuanced debate, and a look at the editorial response, the episode highlights the evolving risk AI poses to the integrity of media and the existential challenges this brings to editors and newsrooms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Odd Pitch: Genesis of the Investigation

• [03:05] Open Call for Freelancers: Hune Brown, editor at The Local in Toronto, describes how an open call for pitches on social issues yielded an unusually high volume and diversity of submissions.
• [03:37] Introducing 'Victoria Goldie':
  • Goldie claims credits with major international publications and provides a seemingly well-researched pitch.
  • Initial checks suggest legitimacy—until further scrutiny reveals a lack of verifiable Canadian bylines.

2. Red Flags: Detecting the Scam

• [07:35] Growing Suspicions:
  • Geographic inconsistencies: Goldie pitches as if based in Toronto, yet prior work suggests England and the US.
  • Unusual Preparation: Extensive interviews and research within a week—a “lot” for an uncommissioned pitch.
• [08:36] Investigation Deepens:
  • Attempts to verify Goldie’s Canadian stories yield nothing.
  • Contacting a quoted doctor ([09:10]) reveals she was falsely cited; made-up quotes and AI-style formulas appear in the pitch.
  • Notable moment:
    • “When I looked at it more closely, you could see some things that felt a little inhuman, I guess.” — Nicholas Hune Brown [09:10]

3. The Rabbit Hole: Tracking “Victoria Goldie” Across the Web

• [11:08] Researching the Byline:
  • Many articles across respected outlets (Guardian, Rolling Stone, Dwell, Business Insider, etc.).
  • Contacting sources in those articles reveals they never spoke to Goldie, though sometimes fabricated quotes sound plausible.
• [14:01] Motivation for Deep Dive:
  • Hune Brown keeps a spreadsheet of Goldie’s byline—a sign of both professional responsibility and personal obsession.

4. Deception in Practice: Confronting the Catfish

• [17:23] Scheduling the Call:
  • After repeated email confirmations and contradictions, Hune Brown arranges a phone call with Goldie.
• [17:56] Surreal Interview:
  • Goldie, cheerful and evasive, invents plausible but false details (e.g., claims of a “personal assistant” for interviews).
  • When pressed hard about fabricated sources, she hangs up—and disappears from the internet ([20:17]).
  • Notable moment:
    • “She had quick, ready responses to every... I mean, implausible, but quick and ready. Almost impressive.” — Nicholas Hune Brown [17:56]

5. The Aftermath: Identity, Motivation, and Impact

• [20:48] Goldie Erases Herself Online:
  • Social accounts vanish; her digital presence is wiped in days.
  • Discussion of whether “Victoria Goldie” is a real person, a team, or an entirely fictitious identity.
  • Pre-ChatGPT articles suggest a real—albeit struggling—freelancer whose style and content later change with AI’s rise.
  • Notable quote:
    • “So I think this is a real individual. This is not their name necessarily, but I think this is one individual.” — Nicholas Hune Brown [22:24]
• [22:00-23:14] From Burnout to Grift:
  • Early work shows a real person grappling with hustle culture.
  • Transition to AI-generated content mirrors the “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality around AI-powered productivity grifts.

6. Journalism at the Crossroads: Industry Reflection

• [23:35] Editorial Reactions:
  • Hune Brown’s exposé draws global attention; other editors report near-misses with similar pitches.
  • Evidence of a broad, multicontinental effort to game the system via AI and anonymized freelancing.
• [24:55] The Economics:
  • AI enables submitting to dozens of outlets at once, making low-value stories lucrative.
  • Notable quote:
    • “If you enter it into ChatGPT and get this thing out five minutes later, that’s a pretty good return, right?” — Nicholas Hune Brown [24:55]
• [25:46-27:44] Editorial Policy Change:
  • The Local now conducts earlier phone screenings and insists on annotated drafts and fact-checking.
  • Fear that these measures will hurt the prospects of new, unknown writers.
  • Notable quote:
    • “The fear is that you’re just going to work with people you already know... and never take a chance on someone new because did they write their pitch? Did they write their previous story even?” — Nicholas Hune Brown [26:40]

7. The New Post-Truth Crisis: Can Journalism Survive?

• [28:12-31:38] Limits of “Close Enough”:
  • Risks of public and even quoted experts accepting plausible—but fabricated—quotes if “they sound like something I would say.”
  • Notable quote:
    • “We’re entering a whole new paradigm about, like, what truth even is.” — Nicholas Hune Brown [29:13]
  • Dexter Thomas plays devil’s advocate around efficiency and the “harm” of plausible fakes—Hune Brown warns of the loss of journalism’s core value: verification.
• [32:45] Broader Consequences:
  • Public trust in journalism already fragile; the rise of AI scammers intensifies the crisis.
  • Notable moment:
    • “What do we do if the writers are lying to the editors or the writers don’t even exist?” — Dexter Thomas [32:45]

8. Epilogue: Unanswered Questions

• [32:52] Not all of Goldie’s articles are gone. Some pre-AI and post-AI articles remain online; reality of their provenance remains unclear.
• [34:09] Moving on:
  • The Local publishes its healthcare issue—without mention of Goldie; the editorial team chooses to move forward rather than let one case overshadow their mission.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “When I looked at it more closely, you could see some things that felt a little inhuman, I guess.”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [09:10]

• “She had quick, ready responses to every... I mean, implausible, but quick and ready. Almost impressive.”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [17:56]

• “So I think this is a real individual. This is not their name necessarily, but I think this is one individual.”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [22:24]

• “If you enter it into ChatGPT and get this thing out five minutes later, that’s a pretty good return, right?”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [24:55]

• “The fear is that you’re just going to work with people you already know... and never take a chance on someone new.”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [26:40]

• “We’re entering a whole new paradigm about, like, what truth even is.”
  — Nicholas Hune Brown [29:13]

• “What do we do if the writers are lying to the editors or the writers don’t even exist?”
  — Dexter Thomas [32:45]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|----------------------------------------------| | 03:05 | Genesis of the pitch call and Victoria Goldie emerges | | 06:01 | The pitch details: "membership medicine" in Canada | | 08:36 | Initial fact-checking and missing bylines | | 09:10 | Discovery of fabricated quotes and "chatgpt-isms" in pitch | | 11:08 | Systematic review of Goldie’s published articles | | 13:44 | Extent of Goldie's byline across publications | | 17:23 | Setting up the confrontation call | | 17:56 | The surreal phone conversation with "Victoria Goldie" | | 20:48 | Goldie deletes online presence; investigation turns to origins | | 24:31 | Evidence Goldie’s pitch strategy was wide and global | | 25:46 | Editorial process changes in response to AI scams | | 29:13 | Philosophical discussion on truth post-AI | | 32:45 | Impact on trust and the existential risk for journalism | | 34:09 | Editorial decision to move on from Goldie in the healthcare issue |

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Summary Takeaway

This episode lays bare a foundational crisis many newsrooms now face: As AI tools empower individuals to automate deception at scale, even seasoned editors can be fooled, and the traditional means of opening doors for new voices are weaponized by those seeking quick profit or shortcuts to prestige. The response—more process, more skepticism—risks closing those doors for genuine new writers. Perhaps most crucially, the line between truth and “close enough” is eroded further in a space that already struggles with public trust. As Dexter Thomas and Nicholas Hune Brown make clear, there are no easy answers—only the uneasy awareness that journalism (and our sense of the truth) just entered a volatile new era.

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Transcript

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[Dexter Thomas]

Hey, it's Brian, one of the hosts of Uncanny Valley. The big interview hosted by my colleague Katie Drummond, is currently on break, but it'll be back very soon on March 24 with brand new conversations. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, Kill Switch.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Hope you enjoy it. Kaleidoscope. I hadn't done a pitch call out in about a year, I guess, so I hadn't really been paying attention to what that world was like. But this time I got like, way more pitches than ever, very quickly, from all over the place. It was very different than the year before.

[Dexter Thomas]

Nicholas Hune Brown is the editor of the Local, which is an independent online magazine that covers social issues. In Toronto last September, they put out an open call for freelance journalists to pitch stories for their upcoming issue.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

We were looking to assign stories, stories about healthcare and money. There's been some creeping privatization in Ontario, where we live, so we put out a call for pitches. I posted something on Bluesky. Just asking freelancers, give me your suggestions.

[Dexter Thomas]

Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there was one in particular that stood out.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goldie. She said in the email that she'd written for a bunch of these Canadian publications that do similar work to what we do. It was a well written pitch, I thought. And when I did a quick Google of her, she had bylines and a bunch of, you know, reputable publications. The Guardian, New York magazine, places like that. You know, when you see someone has written for all these other publications, my first instinct was like, that seems legit. You know, these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to be too suspicious.

[Dexter Thomas]

Why would you be? Yeah, but Victoria Goldie turned out not to be who she said she was. And this sent Nick down a really weird rabbit hole investigation. You've heard of fake news? Well, welcome to a new scam, Fake journalists. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill switch. I'm dexter thomas.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I'm sorry. Goodbye.

[Dexter Thomas]

Back in September, when Nick first put out this call for pitches, the magazine was deliberately trying to expand their freelance writer pool. They were hoping to find new writers, new voices, people with interesting stories to tell.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Part of our mandate is we want to work with young writers. We want to work with people from different parts of the city, different backgrounds. We are actively seeking to work with people who are maybe don't have the clips, are not as experienced, but are able to bring a point of view and a story to us that we won't find elsewhere. So the pitch meant a whole lot. If you could tell me an awesome story in a pitch. If I could see your style on the pitch. If I could see that you had an idea I couldn't find elsewhere. That would go a long way.

[Dexter Thomas]

And Victoria Goldie's pitch hit all those things. It was exactly what Nick was looking for. Her pitch was about a debate in Canada about something called membership medicine. So you probably know that Canada has free, essential healthcare, but membership medicine is basically when patients pay their doctors directly for more premium services. And, man, Victoria was on it. In that initial email to Nick, she wrote, quote, the story would track how these plans transform healthcare into something resembling Netflix or Amazon prime, and what this means for a public system that has long prided itself on. On universality.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

The pitch she sent, it indicated that she'd done a lot of reporting already. She'd done some research. She said she'd spoken with a couple prominent doctors here. She seemed to have some, like, patients who are willing to talk about their experiences with privatized medical care. It seemed like a promising pitch. So we thought, you know, let's, let's take a shot on this person.

[Dexter Thomas]

Just as a fellow freelancer, I appreciate Nick taking that shot on Victoria because I've been there. You're trying to show an editor that you're the person to hire, so you do all this extra work up front. Like, look, I've already done this interview. I've already got access to the hospital. Just say the word, boss, and I will write the best article just for you. So please understand, right now, at this point, I am rooting for Victoria Goldie. So in their next meeting, Nick and his editorial team decide to move forward with Victoria. But then he looked at Victoria's original email again and realized something that he hadn't noticed before.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

You know, I went back to her pitch and some other questions popped up in my mind. Like, the biggest one was, is she in Toronto? You know, when I looked at her Guardian stuff, it was all about her being in England. When she'd done stuff for American magazines, it seemed as if she was writing as. As an American. So I wondered, you know, there are people who are international. There's no reason that you couldn't be publishing and reporting from different places. But yeah, it was a question I had. And the second was that she'd done so much pre reporting for this, she'd done so much work on this pitch within, like, you know, a week or two of me sending out the call out. She'd interviewed four people or something. We're in that first pitch, and I was a freelancer forever. I know that process. And sometimes it's useful to do some reporting before you get a story assigned. But like, that much is a lot. It's a risk, right? There's no guarantee that you're going to land the story. So then I thought, you know, there's times where someone can be a student journalist and then they're reusing interviews they've done before. There's different reasons that that could happen. But that made me question some things.

[Dexter Thomas]

So he dug a little deeper.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So then I wanted to just see what stories she'd done for Canadian publications. I'd seen the work that she'd done at the Guardian, the work she'd done elsewhere, and in her pitch she said she'd written for our national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, kind of magazines that are like us. So I just googled her name along with those publications and nothing.

[Dexter Thomas]

This is where Nick starts to get really suspicious. Could Victoria just be lying about publishing in all these different places? And if she was, what else could she be lying about? He went back to look at her pitch to see if there was any other explanation for this.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Then I was looking at all these quotes that she had in her pitch and some of them were from regular patients, she said, and some were from some prominent doctors in Toronto. And my colleague happens to know one of these doctors. So he shot her an email and said, did you speak to a journalist called Victoria Goldie? And this doctor, Dr. Danielle Martin, said, no, never heard of her. That's very weird that I'm being quoted this way. So when that happened, I kind of knew, I knew what was going on. Right. Like I looked at the pitch again, I read it with kind of different eyes and it felt to me as if someone had been using generative AI to create a pitch with made up quotes from real people. And they had been making up some of their bylines in Canadian publications. And when you reread it again, it was like there was some chatgpt isms, you know, if there was some like formulaic writing about. This pitch is important because of X, it's timely because of Y, it's perfect for your publication because of Z. It felt a little. When I looked at it more closely, you could see some things that felt a little inhuman, I guess.

[Dexter Thomas]

See, that's tough because I've definitely pitched things and I've used language like that.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

No, totally.

[Dexter Thomas]

Like that's what you do. Like you, you tell, hey, I'd like to write this and it's timely. This is happening. It's the anniversary of whatever and we should revisit this.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah, no, all the tells for chatgpt or whatever. Like people say look out for EM dashes and I'm so resentful of that. I use EM dashes all the time.

[Dexter Thomas]

Like it's same.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So I don't know, I don't have a good way of spotting something that. But. But the made up quotes and the kind of made up bylines made me think this is what was happening.

[Dexter Thomas]

So, okay, you starting to think that this is AI, what do you do next?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Then I just got really curious, right? Like it's clear that this was a fake pitch. But like, what about all of those other bylines? Like all those other stories? There's dozens of them across the Internet that she's written. Like, if she was faking stuff in this pitch for us so blatantly, what about those stories?

[Dexter Thomas]

So Nick started looking at Victoria Goldie's previous body of work, and he kind of got obsessed. And that obsession led him to some pretty weird discoveries. That's after the break, After Nick puts together that Victoria seems to have not only chatgpt'd her pitch, but also lied about working on other Canadian publications, he decides that he needs to figure out how far this rabbit hole goes. He's pretty sure he's being lied to, but he's still curious. You didn't confront her immediately?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

No, I wanted to know a little more. I did send some follow up emails. I said, did you actually speak with these people? And she said, yes, I did. I said, are you based in Toronto because we need local reporting? She said, yeah, absolutely, I'm based in Toronto. So the kind of like I understood the level of deception that was going on. I guess I understood that she was making stuff up. So when I started looking into the work that she'd published, the first one I looked at was this feature from the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland, which was like an in depth feature that was about law firms disappearing from the Scottish Highlands and what were rural people doing. And it quoted members of Parliament, it quoted a bunch of lawyers, academics, and then a bunch of regular people. So I was just wondering, is this a real article? I couldn't find any of the regular people. When she begins an anecdote, Fiona, 42, a school teacher in Glengarry or whatever, like those people, Google them, couldn't find any of them. So then I emailed the people that she spoke to who were real, like a professor called Elaine Sutherland, who she quoted in that piece. And I just emailed and said, did you speak to this writer? And she said, no, absolutely not. But what's weird is that this sounds like the kind of thing I would say, wow. And this was the response that I was getting in a lot of places. And I don't know, it's one of the eerier things, right. It's not someone just making stuff up. But it is, I believe, AI searching through the Internet thinking, who is the likely person who can talk about Scottish law firms disappearing from the Highlands? You find someone who maybe has spoken about that in the past or written a research paper about it or whatever it is, and then kind of invents quotes that sound kind of like in the ballpark of what you might say. So that was the first piece that I thought, okay, this is a made up. And then I just kept looking. There were more. There was a story in Dwell that quoted like 10 prominent international designers and architects. And I just started sending emails to all of them, and they had not spoken to this person.

[Dexter Thomas]

Victoria had published work in the Guardian and Business Insider, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Africa Vogue, Philippines. I could keep going here. This is a resume that almost any freelance journalist would be really jealous of. How many articles did you have out there?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I think over two dozen. I think I've got a spreadsheet of over two dozen articles. You made a spreadsheet? I got obsessed. I don't know. I was not gonna write about this. We're a local publication that only writes about Toronto. Right. I was just doing this out of curiosity to begin with, but I don't know, it just seems so wild to me that this stuff was out there. And maybe I sound like overly people are lying on the Internet, but I found it shocking, I guess. How dare somebody lie on the Internet? Yeah, yeah, but I lie on the Internet under the Guardian's name or whatever.

[Dexter Thomas]

That is different. Yeah, that is different.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah.

[Dexter Thomas]

Getting on there and saying, hey, yo, I don't know, somebody like lying on their dating profile, Yo, I'm six foot two and like, bro, you're five three. Like, okay, maybe not a nice thing to do. But also very different from fooling the public into thinking that something happened. And some people said some things that they actually never did.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah.

[Dexter Thomas]

So one place that had published Victoria's work had actually already taken some stuff down, but they didn't say it was because of AI.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I emailed with editors of other publications and spoke to a former editor at popsugar, which had taken down a number of articles that she'd written. So I went online and said that it was taken down because there were inconsistencies or it didn't live up to Popsugar's standards. The editor said that there were plagiarism issues with the stories.

[Dexter Thomas]

So walk me through this. What were you feeling at this time?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I felt embarrassed to begin with. I think the pitch call was I said something about the ways that health and money collide in 2025 in Ontario, something like that. And it felt to me like the pitches were some large language model taking that little prompt and sending me back, like, what I wanted to hear. And of course I was like, oh, yeah, I'm into this. This makes sense. This is all about how health and money collide in 2025. Like, I was. Yeah, I was. I was embarrassed at being kind of like, sent back my own prompt in a way that felt like it was just designed to appeal to me. And I got fooled. Right. As I moved through it, though, I don't know, I began to feel, maybe this sounds overblown, but a sense of despair. At a certain point, I'm tracking down all this stuff. She's telling lies all over the place. I go back to my inbox, which still has a million pitches, and I'm going through it and I'm seeing the ones that look so synthetic, so AI, and I start idly googling some of those authors and I see that they have places across the Internet as well. And I'm not going to do a deep dive on every single freelancer that ends up in my inbox. But, like, how much of this stuff is out there? Like, how much of. I don't know, you know, that was depressing to me. I spent my whole life writing journalism and this feeling of this just being the tip of a pretty, like, awful iceberg was dispiriting.

[Dexter Thomas]

I guess after investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers. He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I wanted to talk to her. I had like, so many questions about who this person really is. Like, I. As I'm in this world, I'm reading their writing, right? And I'm. And some of it's first person stuff and it's all obviously all a mix of. Of true and false or completely false. I'm trying to figure out where they are. It feels like from some other earlier writing and some other social media that they may be based in Nigeria or at least are from Nigeria. I just had a ton of questions for this person, so I wanted to get them on the phone. So I did. I emailed and said, let's chat about this piece.

[Dexter Thomas]

Nick emails Victoria asking if he can Talk more about her article. From a freelancer's standpoint, an initial check in call is a pretty normal next step toward officially being accepted and being paid. So Victoria agreed to a video call, and they set it up for. For later that week.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

In the 10 minutes before that was about to start, they emailed and said, I think I have Internet connections. Let's do this over audio. And then I got them over the phone. And it was a strange conversation. It was a kind of surreal experience.

[Dexter Thomas]

What happened?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So I guess in the fantasy version of this conversation that I had been trying to plan out was I would present them with some inconsistencies and they get bigger and bigger, and at a certain point they would just have to admit these lies. And then maybe we could actually talk about who they were. And, you know, were they a real journalist who had gotten it over their heads? Were they a scammer who had just, like, found some easy marks with, like, overworked editors? That was the, like, the unrealistic dream version of this conversation. How it actually happened was I got on the phone, someone very chipper who sounded to my ear like a young woman with an African accent was on the phone. I asked where she was based in Toronto, and she cheerfully said, bluer, which is like, if you said, whereabouts do you live in New York? And they just said, Broadway. Right, okay. But, you know, this person had had Googled a street in Toronto. So I was right. I was already, you know, well done. And then I kind of just walked them through some of the inconsistencies and I didn't want to spook them necessarily. I didn't want them to hang up right away. So I asked them if they'd spoken to the doctor in her pitch. She said, yes, she had. I mentioned that, you know, we actually spoke to that doctor and she says she didn't speak to you? And she said, oh, yes, of course. My, my personal assistant actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact that freelance journalists don't have personal assistants. I kind of let that drift past. I asked why I couldn't find the stories in the Walrus and Globe and Mail, and she said most of those were done online only. I emailed the editors from the Globe and the Walrus and they said they've never worked with her. I asked if she'd just recently moved to Toronto because it seemed like she was writing first person stories from London and other places. And she said, yeah, she just moved this year. I asked her why those stories were gone from Popsugar. And she said, oh, the editor moved on from Popsugar. So they took down all the articles that they worked on with me, which is not how that works. Every question she sort of answered very cheerfully, very upbeat, didn't seem to be shaken by it. She had quick, ready responses to every. I mean, implausible, but quick and ready. Almost impressive. And then I kind of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies. Right. I started talking about that story in the Scottish Journal. I said that she'd quoted this professor, Elaine Sutherland. I said I'd actually spoken to Elaine Sutherland. And she said, she's never spoken to you. And I realized in the pause afterwards that she. That she was gone, that she'd hung up. She's not responded to an email since. I've not heard from her since.

[Dexter Thomas]

And it looks like that last question did it for Victoria. She knew the jig was up, but Nick still wanted to find out, who is Victoria Goldie? We'll get into that after the break. After that phone call, Victoria quietly removed herself from the Internet.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

In the days that followed, the EX account that had been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her Muck Rack page, which is kind of list of all the journalists stories that went private. Her personal website went down. She kind of disappeared after that phone call. And I say she. At this point, I do not know who like Victoria Goldie is. The evidence suggests that this person is either from or still lives in Nigeria. I don't think it's a whole farm of people working together and sending out stuff under one byline, although it could be. That's something that crossed my mind a lot. I've. For a while I thought maybe there's no singular person attached to this name at all. Maybe it's just one of a dozen bylines that people are using to get paid for some writing. I don't think that's the case. One of the earliest stories I found under that byline, it was a couple months before ChatGPT came out, which is kind of the demarcating line, I think, after which you can't trust that a sentence was written by a human. And it felt different. Those early stories were. There's some grammatical mistakes, they're clumsier, they're less smooth, less slick, but they seem to represent a real person talking about real things.

[Dexter Thomas]

One article from that pre ChatGPT era is from May of 2022. It's a piece that Victoria Goldie wrote for a website called Black Ballad with the title How I'm Learning to Navigate Toxic Positivity. On social media. And there's this line where she writes, quote, there's this immense pressure to be productive. Most people, like me, are tired and trying to survive day to day.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So I think this is a real individual. This is not their name necessarily, but I think this is one individual. And you see a kind of continuity of interest throughout. They're into key dramas, they're into afrobeats. There's some continuity of what feels like a person there. I can't know for sure, but I think this is an individual who, at least in those early stories, is writing about going online like the rest of us and making her miserable. Seeing people who are presenting themselves as doing so well, seeing all this hustle culture, and they're just struggling to get by day to day.

[Dexter Thomas]

So in the beginning, she was writing about going online, seeing hustle culture, getting kind of depressed. And that's what the hustle culture rose is selling you right now is, hey, here's how to make a bunch of money by cranking out content with AI. Exactly. Kind of can't beat them, join them type thing.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah. So in the end, like, I don't know who this person is. I have some sympathy for them.

[Dexter Thomas]

After all of this, Nick decided to make his investigation public. And he published a piece in the Local. And that's actually where I first read about it. The title of his piece was called Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism's AI Era.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

We published the piece. It got a crazy response, But I think the most like, telling response I got was so many emails from editors from around the world, which was kind of mind blowing. Victoria Goldie had been pitching, like, everywhere, everywhere from nature to an Oakland startup that began like, a few weeks ago, doing book reviews. Someone on the west coast who's running this tiny indigenous run publication said that they had just assigned a story to her, and they just did a quick Google to her and they're like, thank you so much. We were very close to signing the contract. Someone else from this publication called Republic, they phoned me up. They were in the middle of a second draft with her. They were editing a story about people living in their vans in the American Southwest that was based on Victoria's own experience living in a van in the American Southwest. The Financial Times, like, around the world. This person was really incredibly prolific.

[Dexter Thomas]

Just the sheer volume of pitches that Victoria Goldie was sending out might give us a hint at her motivations. Journalism is famously not a very lucrative career, especially for a freelance journalist. Ask me how I know and maybe Pre AI, Victoria was having trouble finding work. But if you can start writing for dozens of places at once, that might start to add up.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I guess part of what's interesting to me is I think we were offering 2,000 bucks for this story. That's, that's our rate Dwell paid. You know, I think she got fifteen hundred dollars for that or something in that Dwell article. If you actually had interviewed 10 of the top designers in the world, like, you know, that fifteen hundred dollars doesn't go far. But if you entered into ChatGPT and get this thing out five minutes later, that's a pretty good return. Right?

[Dexter Thomas]

And for a long time she got away with it. Victoria Goldie had dozens of articles across the Internet for a bunch of really well respected publications. By the end of Nick's investigation, four of her old articles had come down. But as of this recording, there are still a few out there. How do we change editorial processes? I mean, how has the local changed their editorial process? Are there different hoops that somebody has to jump through to submit an article?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I mean, yeah, it got a big response on the Internet, but it got a big response in our newsroom. Like we've been thinking about how do we do what we do going forward in this era. Like I said at the beginning, we want to work with new writers. Right. Like this is our whole thing. I owe my career to like a pitch used to be this key that could open the door. Even if you didn't know anybody at a publication, if you could write an amazing pitch, that's a way into places, a pitch now is not connected or is not necessarily connected to any human being. Right. So when we are trying to find new writers, what do you do? It's made our jobs difficult. Like we're talking about, I'm going to do more coffees with young freelancers. I'm going to phone their editors. But this is all like, this is all a bummer. This all takes so much time. It takes so much money. Everyone's already overworked. And I think the fear is that you're just going to work with people you already know. You're just going to work with established people. You're never going to take a chance on someone new because did they write their pitch? Did they write their previous story even?

[Dexter Thomas]

Like you can't trust anything. Yeah, yeah.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So I am doing more phone calls earlier in the process. With writers, at least you get a sense of a person, you know, you're talking to a real person. We're like, we've beefed up our fact checking process. So people send annotated drafts. We're checking through them. I think if you had robust fact checking, like, this story is not getting into Dwell magazine. Right. The depressing thing about this scammer, as opposed to like classic scammers like Jason Blair or like Stephen Glass. Right. Like people making up stuff in the past. They were doing that in a world where journalism was. Has a certain amount of power and prestige, and they're doing it for that reason. This is people who are taking advantage of an ecosystem that is like, already pretty broken and.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah. And overworked.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Overworked. Yeah. There's not fact checkers. I don't think an editor at some of these places could have thought twice about some of this stuff. Even so, yeah. To combat it, it would take more money, it would take more resources, it would take journalists spending more time doing that work. And we're already at a point where we're going in the opposite direction. Right.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah. I mean, when you said robust fact checking, any journalist listening to this are probably laughing and. Or spit out their coffee or crying into their coffee, probably. Because that's one of the things that gets cut. You know, that's like, do organizations have fact checkers? Yes, but maybe they used to have five and now they have one. Or the editor maybe is being asked to handle all that work and so we got to spend money to clean it up.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah.

[Dexter Thomas]

And I mean, this is. It's interesting because this isn't really necessarily about AI. You know, I hate. I hate to echo the AI boosters here. Right. But this is something that's often said, AI is a tool. And this is somebody who. And maybe multiple somebodies who are using just a tool that is more efficient.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Exactly. The scale would be impossible without AI. The efficiency I would not have heard from dozens of editors around the world who'd been pitched stories that fit pretty well into their niche. Like, we're kind of weren't way off. That's only possible with the technology. Right. But yeah, this is human beings using that technology to do something that they've done for a while.

[Dexter Thomas]

But there is something new that comes with these AI models that have scraped everything ever written. It's changing people's definitions of truth and lies in ways that journalists haven't had to think about before. And I'm not just saying, you know, oh, truth is important, lies are bad. I just mean that it's getting weird.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

So one of the responses I got from one of these experts who I followed up on, who had quotes Made up by Victoria Goldie for one of these stories. They said, that's not me. I don't remember speaking to this writer, but that sounds like something I would say. And I'm okay with that material being out there. And that, like, wow, that. That took me aback. Like, that. That indicates that we are part of a world where, like, I think we already know that A lot of people don't mind the slop. Like, the slop is everywhere because people are fine with it if it's backs up some of their preconceived ideas or it seems close enough. Right. And the fact that individuals themselves are okay with being represented, you know, it's close enough to what they said or what they believe. That makes me think like, we are in a. We're entering a whole new paradigm about, like, what truth even is. And that is, like, I don't know.

[Dexter Thomas]

All right, counterpoint. What if it doesn't matter that we've got AI journalists? Look, you wanted an article on the kind of creeping privatization of the healthcare system. You have a general idea of what some of these people are going to say. And for a lay reader who isn't really familiar with everything, they need to be brought up to speed on the basics, right? So what's the harm in having some chatbot fill in the blanks for them and say some things that are pretty plausible from a few experts? The AI models, it's trained on everything they've said. It knows about what they're going to say.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah, this is the argument that kind of terrifies me. Right.

[Dexter Thomas]

To be clear, I'm not advocating for this.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

No, no, no, I know, I know. I hear you. Taking the AI point of view, first of all, they don't know what individuals say. Right? Everyone is surprising, and AI can only say what's been said already. It's incapable of actually advancing a story. And the news is about saying what is new. Right. And that is something that I think cannot be replaced at all. But more fundamentally, I don't know, we just can't be cool with having stuff that is not true presented as true because it's close enough. Or it's like we're losing that grip on when someone's quoted, they have to have said a thing. I feel like I'm losing my mind as we're kind of moving away from actually recognizing that when you say stuff's true, it's got to be true. Otherwise, what are we even. How can we talk? How can we argue? How can we agree on anything?

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah, I think we were in the post truth thing already. And it's like, post, post truth. Yeah.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

I think university professors have been here for a while already. It's been a few years of them dealing with this world. But for me personally, in my little corner of magazine journalism, I haven't been confronted with it until now.

[Dexter Thomas]

Yeah, no, it's interesting you bring that up because I think a lot of people are curious about how university professors or high school professors or whatever are dealing with the fact that, yeah, a lot of their students are probably just typing a prompt into ChatGPT and then, you know, cranking out a thousand word essay. But that's a very controlled environment. You know, it's a fishbowl. If somebody at the university down the road, ChatGPT generates their history exam, that doesn't affect me personally. But if somebody is chatgpt generating an article about what the LAPD is doing or not doing, that could affect me. And we're already a stage where people just straight up don't trust journalism at all. And what do we do if the writers are lying to the editors or the writers don't even exist?

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have no answers. It's weighing on me.

[Dexter Thomas]

As of right now, as I'm recording this, not all of Victoria Goldie's work is gone. So among that work are three articles that she wrote for Business Insider. Two of those were published just before ChatGPT dropped in November of 2022, and one came out right after I dug into all of these articles. Each one is an interview with one person who, as far as I can tell, seems to actually exist. The articles are kind of boring, but they seem legit. But there's also this really interesting article that she wrote for the Guardian, and this one only came out in September of 2025. So Victoria Goldie writes about hanging out in East London and going to raves and soccer games, mixing with different people, learning about different cultures. And near the end of this really personal essay, she writes, quote, the future of our music is not written by algorithm. That article has been taken down. So was that one real? Is any of this real? How many of us even care? All right, I don't want to lose sight of how all this started. Nick has finally put his investigation to rest and the local special on healthcare in Canada is now out and it's ready for you to read it. And if you're wondering if they're going to put something about Victoria Goldie in

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

there, I don't think so. I don't think so. We're Moving on. We're moving on. Moving on, moving on.

[Dexter Thomas]

I dig it. Thank you so much for checking out another episode of Killswitch. If you want to talk to us, you can email us at Killswitch, Kaleidoscope nyc or on Instagram. We're killswitchpod. And before you move on to doing something else, maybe think of leaving the show a review. It helps other people people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluk Potts and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch and Kyle also mixes the show. From Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswal Ashian, Mangesh Hatikadur and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Itor. Catch y' all next week.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Goodbye.

[Dexter Thomas]

This week on the Political Scene, from the New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

Europe caught between two adversarial great powers that's basically dialing back the clock to

[Framer Representative]

not only Pre World War II, but

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

really it's a pre 20th century view of the world and I would say

[Framer Representative]

it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

[Dexter Thomas]

Join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nicholas Hune Brown]

From prx.