"Victoria’s stilted email, and a closer read of the original pitch, revealed what should have been clear from the start: with its rote phrasing (“This story matters because of… It is timely because of… It fits your readership because of…”), it had all the 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, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.
But if Victoria’s pitch appeared to be an AI-generated fabrication, and if she was making up interviews and bylines, what to make of her long list of publications?
Since 2022, the byline “Victoria Goldiee” has been attached to dozens of articles. There are a series of “as-told to” stories in Business Insider. (“I’m a 22-year-old Amazon delivery driver. The cameras in my truck keep me on high alert, but it’s my dream job and the flexible hours are great,” is a novel take on Amazon’s labour practices). There had been an interview with the comic actor Nico Santos in Vogue Philippines, a feature on Afrobeats in RollingStone Africa (no longer on the site), a product recommendation for a DVD drive in New York Magazine’s The Strategist, and, in the past two years, a move away from culture writing to meatier features."
https://thelocal.to/investigating-scam-journalism-ai/
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