A couple months ago, I listened to an episode of a podcast called Question Everything by KCRW and Placement Theory. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
It shared the story of an editor’s quest to uncover the truth about a freelance writer.
Nicholas Hune-Brown is an editor at a nonprofit online magazine called The Local — it covers health and social issues in Toronto, Canada.
In the podcast episode, Nick shares how he loves to give new writers a platform and help build up their reporting skills. But everything changed when he received a suspicious pitch from a writer named Victoria Goldiee.
As Nick dug into her past work — discovering made-up quotes from real people, likely created using AI — it became apparent the writer wasn’t who she seemed.
Goldiee was publishing fake stories for major newsrooms around the world. By the end of Nick’s investigation, four different publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, took down her stories off their websites.
“This is a strange moment in journalism and AI where we do not know necessarily how to move forward,” Nick says. “We don't know what is true and what's not. If you’re an assigning editor, it’s a stressful corner to have to live in right now.”
You can read Nick’s original story and the fallout since his investigation at The Local.
Nick’s retelling of his run-in with an AI freelancer struck a chord with me, because something similar happened to my close friend just a week before I stumbled upon his story. My friend accepted a pitch from a freelancer before realizing that something was off and the writer was likely using AI.
Even in the age of AI, I was wearing rose-colored glasses. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised — but I was — about how common AI freelancers have become. And there’s a lot we don’t know: who is the freelancer? Is it one person, multiple? Or is it an AI persona?
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how people do their jobs — and in the media industry, journalists are grappling with the damage of AI slop as well as how to keep up with this era and responsibly use AI tools to bolster our reporting.
In a recent Lake Effect special, we explored how AI is impacting different parts of our workforce. I spoke with Nick about his investigation into an AI freelancer and what it reveals about the future of journalism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Xcaret Nuñez: What has been the fallout and reactions from journalists since your story came out?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: After I had that phone call with [Victoria Goldiee], she sort of disappeared from the internet. Once I reached out to all the publications where I'd found that she'd been making stuff up, those stories came down, so they issued an apology at The Guardian, at Dwell, and a couple other publications. And then after it was published, I got the wildest reaction from fellow journalists of any story I've ever written. I heard from so many people from around the world, from the tiniest publications to like the biggest ones who had all been pitched by Victoria Goldiee, or whoever this person was who was pitching them. I think it spooked a lot of people. I know this has made it into some journalism ethics courses and has been circulated through some newsrooms as a cautionary tale. I think it struck a chord because this is a strange moment in journalism and AI where we do not know necessarily how to move forward. We don't know what is true and what's not. This is one tiny corner of that larger conversation. But if you’re an assigning editor, it’s a stressful corner to have to live in right now.
I can only imagine that this experience must have diminished some level of trust or the lens in which you read over pitches. So how has this experience affected how you approach accepting pitches now?
Honestly, it's been a bit disastrous. This was the one pitch that came through that I thought was pretty good. But when I put out that call for pitches, I was immediately inundated with so many more pitches than I've ever received before. The vast majority of which were clearly AI from everywhere. My inbox was overflowing with this stuff. So we haven't put out a public call for pitches since. So that means we've been reaching out to writers we already know, and I've been looking for writers at other publications. I've also had coffee with people. But what we want to do usually at The Local is to remain open to brand new voices, to people we haven't worked with before, to develop new writers. This is what's in our DNA. Receiving a pitch from someone you don't know used to be a good way to get a sense of “Here's a new exciting voice,” and “Here's a person who has ideas and experiences that I don't know about.” You can't take that at face value anymore. So we are trying to figure out how to remain open to new people.
Coming out of this experience, how did it leave you feeling about the future of AI in journalism, and how did your newsroom respond to the situation?
[The Local] responded by crafting an AI policy, which I think will continue to change as this technology changes. But the basics of it are that the work that you read and the photos that you see at The Local are made by human beings. We don't use generative AI. We put a clause in our contract, making sure that freelancers we work with know this. We've instituted tougher fact-checking measures just to be sure that nothing like this can slip through. So that's what we've done at the institutional level.
For myself — I've been thinking about AI and reading about it in all sorts of different ways. This tool that's supposed to make life easier has in many ways made our job harder. I’m not someone that discounts AI as this useless technology, but I think for the kind of work that we want to do, what makes most sense in a world that is increasingly filled with AI slop, is to lean into the aspects of our journalism that can only be done by a human. That is what we think is valuable to our readers and to the people that come to us. We can see that in the stories that we do — where someone is sitting in on a school board meeting that is not on the internet, that you cannot get that information anywhere else, and then a reporter buttonholes a parent and and talks to them about their concerns — that's the kind of work that can only be done by a human. Those are the kinds of stories that we are leaning into.
What do you hope everyday readers and listeners take away from our conversation and about what's going on in the journalism industry today?
I hope that they understand that most journalists are still desperately trying to make sure that they find out things that are true and are not indifferent to that. It's something that keeps us up at night. We are desperately trying to ensure that everything we report is true and I hope that people value reporting that is actually factual.
You can read Nicholas Hune-Brown's original story and the fallout from his AI freelancer investigation at The Local. You can also hear Nick retell his story on the Question Everything podcast.
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