January 28, 2026 • 32 mins
When an editor at a local magazine in Toronto received a pitch from a promising new freelancer, he didn’t expect it to spiral into an obsessive investigation. What followed was a deep dive into a web of fake interviews, impossible bylines, and fake reporting. Dexter talks with Nicholas Hune-Brown to trace how he uncovered an AI journalist and what it reveals about journalism today.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read:
- “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era” https://thelocal.to/investigating-scam-journalism-ai/
- “The Fallout From Our AI Freelancer Investigation” https://thelocal.to/fallout-from-ai-freelancer-investigation/
- The Local’s recent issue, “The Cost of Care” https://thelocal.to/winter-2026/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
I hadn't done a pitch call out 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.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Nicholas hun 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.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We were looking to assign 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 Blue Sky just asking freelancers give me a suggestions.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there
was one in particular that stood out.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goald. 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, repude of publications,
The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know,
when you see someone has written for all these other publications,
(01:17):
my first instinct was, like, that seems legit. You know,
these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to
be too suspicious.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Why would you be?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
This is kill Switch. I'm Dexterah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
I'm sorry, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
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 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 found elsewhere, So like the pitch meant a whole lot,
Like if you could tell me an awesome story in
(03:12):
a pitch, if I could see your style on the pitch,
if I could see that you had like an idea
I couldn't find elsewhere, that would go a long way.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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 health care,
but membership medicine is basically when patients pay their doctors
directly for more premium services, and man, Victoria was on it.
(03:42):
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 universality.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
The pitch she sent it indicated that she 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 take
a shot on this person.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
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. Once you'd done stuff for American magazines,
it seemed as if she was writing as an American,
So I wondered, you know that there are people who
are international. There's no reason that you could be publishing
(05:16):
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 setting 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
(05:36):
get a story assigned. But like that much is there's
a lot that'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 could be a student
journalist and then they're reusing interviews they've done before. There's
different reasons that could happen. But that made me question
some things, so he dug a little deeper. So then
I wanted to just see what stories she'd done for
(05:59):
Canadian publics. 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 in these
papers of 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 came up. This
is where Nick starts to get really suspicious. Could Victoria
just be lying about publishing in all these different places?
(06:22):
And if she was, what else could she be lying about?
She went back to look at her pitch to see
if there was any other explanation for this. 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?
(06:44):
Doctor Daniel 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
(07:06):
real people, and they had been making up some of
their botolines in Canadian publications, and when you reread it again,
it was like there was some chat gptisms, you know,
if there was some like formulaic writing about this pitch
is important because of X, it's timely, because of why,
it's perfect for your publication, because of Z. It felt
a little When I looked at it more closely, you
(07:28):
could see some things that felt a little inhuman.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I guess, hmmm, See that's tough because I've definitely pitched
things that I've used language like that. No, totally, like
that's what you do, Like you tell, hey, I'd like
to write this, and it's timely because this is happening.
It's the anniversary of whatever. We should revisit this.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah, no, all the telles for chat GPT or whatever.
Like people say looking for M dashes and I'm so
resentful of that. I use M dashes all the time,
like it's same. So I don't know, I don't have
a good way of spawning something. But the made up
quotes and the kind of made up bylines made me
think this is what was happening.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So okay, you're starting to think that this is AI.
What do you do next?
Speaker 1 (08:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
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.
(08:52):
After Nick puts together that Victoria seems to have not
only chat GPT or pitch, but also lied about working
on other Canadians publications, he decides that he needs to
figure out how far this rabbit hole goes. He's pretty
sure he's being laed to, but he's still curious. You
didn't confront her immediately?
Speaker 1 (09:13):
No, I wanted to know a little more, did. I
did send some follow up emails. I said, like, 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 and 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
(09:35):
one I looked at was this feature from the Journal
of the Law Society of Scotland, which is like an
in depth feature that was about law firms disappearing from
the Scottish Highlands and like what were rural people doing?
And I quoted like members of parliament, I quoted a
bunch of lawyers, academics, and then a bunch of regular people.
So I was just wondering, like, this is a real article.
I couldn't find any of the regular people, you know,
(09:56):
when she begins an anecdote, like Fiona forty to a
school teacher in Glengarry or whatever, like those people google them,
can 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
(10:17):
weird is that this sounds like the kind of thing
I would say, wow, And this is 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
(10:39):
too 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 story,
and then I just kept looking. There were more. There
was a story in Dwell that quoted like ten prominent
international designers and architects, and I just started sending emails
(11:00):
to all of them, and they had not spoken to
this person.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Victoria had published work in The Guardian, in Business Insider,
New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Africa, Vogue, Philippines. I could
keep going here. This is a resume that almost any
freelance journalists would be really jealous of.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
How many articles should you have out there? I think
over two dozen. I think I've got a spreadsheet of
over two dozen articles. You made a spreadsheet I got,
I got obsessed. I don't know I was not gonna
write about this. We're a local publication that only reads
about Toronto, right, I was just doing this set 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 it sound like overly, you know, people are
(11:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
That is different. Yeah, that is different.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, 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 to three.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Like okay.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I emailed with editors of other publications and spoke to
a former editor at Pop Sugar, which had taken down
a number of articles that she'd written. So I went
online and it said that was taken down because there
inconsistencies or didn't live up to Pop Sugar standards. The
editor said that there were plagiarism issues with the stories.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So walk me through this, Like, what were you feeling
at this time?
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I felt embarrassed to begin with. I think the pitch
call was I said something about like the ways that
health and money collide and twenty twenty five and Ontario
something like that, and it felt to me like the
pitches were some large language model taken 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
(13:03):
money collide in twenty twenty five, Like I was. Yeah,
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, like I
don't know, I began to feel maybe it sounds overblown,
but like a sense of despair, Like at a certain point,
I'm tracking down all this stuff she's telling lies all
(13:25):
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 started 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?
(13:47):
Like how much of I don't know?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
You know that?
Speaker 1 (13:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Guess.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
After investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers.
He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
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 its first person stuff, and
it's all obviously all a mix 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
(14:31):
other social media that they're they may be based in Nigeria,
or at least or from Nigeria. I said, a ton
of questions for this person, so I wanted to get
them on the phone. So I so I did that,
emailed and said, let's let's chat about this piece.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Nick emails Victoria asking if he can talk more about
her article. From a freelancers standpoint, and 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 later that week.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
In the ten 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 it was a kind of surreal experience.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
What happened.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
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 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
are real journalists who had gotten in over their heads.
Were they a scammer who had just like found some
(15:37):
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 send it 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,
(16:00):
But you know, this person had had googled the street
in Toronto, so I was I was already, you know,
well done. Yeah, 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
(16:21):
she said, oh, yes, of course, my personal assistant I
actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact
that like freelance journalists don't have personal assistance. I kind of, right, yeah,
let that drift past. I asked why I couldn't find
the stories in the Walrus and the 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
(16:42):
if she 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 the stories were gone from Pop
Sugar and she said, oh, the editor moved on from
Pop Sugar, so they took down all the articles that
they worked talking with me, which is not how is
not how that works. Every question she just sort of answered,
very cheerfully, very upbeat, didn't seem to be shaken by it.
(17:06):
She had quick responses to every I mean, implausible, but
quick and ready. It's almost impressive. And then I kind
of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
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
has 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 any email since. I've
(17:35):
not heard from her since.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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
(18:06):
removed herself from the Internet.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
In the days that followed, the x account that had
been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her mockrack page,
which is kind of a list of all a journalists
stories that went private. Her personal website went down. She
kind of disappeared after that phone call, and I say,
she I at this point, I don't not know who
(18:29):
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. Something that crossed my mind a lot for
a while, I thought maybe there's no singular person attached
(18:49):
to this name at all. Maybe it's just, you know,
one of a dozen bylines that people are using to
get paid for some writing. I don't think that's the case.
That one of the earliest stories I found under that byline,
it was a couple months before Chatgebet came out, which
is kind of the demarketing line I think, after which
like you can't trust that a sentence was written by
a human, And it was like it felt different. Those
(19:09):
early stories were there's some grammatical mistakes, they're clumsier, they're
less smooth, less slick, but they seem to represent like
a real person talking about real things.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
One article from that pre chatgpt era is from May
of twenty twenty two. 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
(19:41):
tired and trying to survive day to day.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
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
their into key dramas, they're into afrobeats. There's some continuity
of which feels like a person there. I can't know
for sure, but I think this as an individual who,
at least in those early stories, is writing about going
online like the rest of us and making her miserable
(20:06):
seeing people who are presenting themselves as doing so well,
seeing all this hustle culture and they're just struggling to
get by a day to day.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
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. So kind of can't beat them,
join them type thing.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, So in the end, like I don't know who
this person is, I have some sympathy for them.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
We published the piece, it got a crazy response, but
I think the most like telling response. All 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 was running this tiny
(21:17):
indigenous run publication said that they had just assigned a
story to her and they just, oh my god, did
a quick Google to her and they're like, thank you
so much. We were very close to sending the contract.
Someone else from this publication called Republic. They phoned me
up there 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
(21:39):
own experience living in a van in the American Southwest.
The Financial Times like around the world. This this person
was really incredibly prolific.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
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,
(22:12):
that might start to add up.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
I guess part of what's interesting to me is, I
think we were offering two thousand bucks for this story.
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 ten of the
top designers in the world, like you know that fifteen
hundred dollars, it doesn't go far. If you entered into
chat GPT and get this thing out of five minutes later,
that's a pretty good return, right.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
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,
(23:00):
how is the local change their editorial process or they're
different hoops that somebody has to jump through to submitted article.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
I mean, yeah, you 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
(23:27):
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 and 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.
(23:49):
And I think the fear is that you're just gonna
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?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Like you can't trust anything?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, yeah, 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 or checking through them. I
think if you had robust fact checking, like this story
(24:22):
is not getting into twelve 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 or journalism 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
(24:42):
is like already pretty broken and yeah and overworked, 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, would take more resources, it would
take journalists spending more time in that work. And we're
already at a point where like we're going in the
(25:03):
opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Right, Yeah, I mean when when you said robust fact checking,
any journalists 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.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Cut, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
That's like do organizations have fact checkers, Yes, but maybe
they used to have five and 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. Yeah, And I mean this is it's interesting
because this isn't really necessarily about AI. You know, I
(25:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Exactly the scale would be impossible with it at the
efficiency I would not have heard from dozens of editors
around the world had been pitched stories that fit pretty
well into their niche Like we're kind of we're way off.
That's only possible with the technology, right, But yeah, this
is this is human beings using that technology to do
something that they've done for a while.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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, there's important, lies or bad. I
just mean that it's getting weird.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
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 took me back, Like that that
indicates that we are part of a world where, like
(26:56):
I think we already know that a lot of people
don't mind the slap, like the slop is ever where,
because people are fine with it if it's that's 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
(27:17):
in a we're entering a whole new paradigm about like
what truth even is.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
And that is like I don't know, 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
(27:42):
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 at speed on the basics. Right,
So what's the harm in having, you know, some chatbot
fill in the blanks for them and say some things
that are pretty plausible from a few experts. The AI
models is trained on everything they've said. It knows about
(28:03):
what they're gonna say.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Yeah, I mean, this is the argument that kind of
terrifies me, right, Like, I think, to be.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Clear, I'm not advocating for this.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
No, no, no, I know, I know, I know, I
hear you taking the point of view, Like, I mean,
first of all, they don't know what individuals say, right,
everyone is surprising, and a I 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, like I don't know, we
(28:34):
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 you know, when someone's
quoted they have to have said a thing, when when
like I feel like I'm losing my mind as we're
kind of moving away from actually recognizing that, like when
you say stuff's true, it's got to be It's got
to be true. Otherwise, what are we even? How can
(28:54):
we talk? How can we argue? How can we agree
on anything?
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, I think we were, we were in the post
truth thing already. It's like post post truth.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, I think like university professors have been here for
a while already, Like it's been a few years of
them dealing with this world. But for me personally, in
like my little corner of magazine journalism, I haven't been
confronted with it until now.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
You know, it's interesting you.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Bring that up, because I think a lot of people
are curious about how university and professors or high school
professors or whatever dealing with the fact that, yeah, a
lot of their students are probably just typing a prompt
into CHATGBT and then you know, cranking out a thousand
word essay. But that's a very controlled environment. You know,
it's a fish bowl. If somebody at the university down
the road chat gbt generates their history exam, that doesn't
(29:39):
affect me personally. But if somebody is chatgebt generating an
article about what the LAPD is doing or not doing, that.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Could affect me.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
And we're already a stage where people just straight up
don't trust journalism at all. And what do we do
if the if the writers are lying to the editors,
or the writers don't even exist.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, yeah, I have no answers. It's weighing on me.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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 chat ChiPT dropped in
November of twenty twenty two, 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
(30:32):
I can tell, seems to actually exists. 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 twenty
twenty five. 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
(30:56):
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?
Speaker 4 (31:15):
All right?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
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 there, I.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Don't think so. I don't think so. We're moving moving on,
We're moving on.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
Moving on, moving on. I dig it.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Thank you so much for checking out another episode of
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC
or on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
We're at kill Switch Pod.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And before you move on to doing something else, maybe
think of leaving the show or a review. It helps
other 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 Shena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and
Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle Murdoch,
and Kyle also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive
(32:11):
producers are Ozma Lashin from Geshatgadour and Kate Osborne from iHeart.
Our executive producers of Katrina Norville and Nikki E Tour
catch on next week
Speaker 4 (32:30):
Goodbye
I hadn't done a pitch call out 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.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Nicholas hun 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.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
We were looking to assign 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 Blue Sky just asking freelancers give me a suggestions.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there
was one in particular that stood out.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goald. 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, repude of publications,
The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know,
when you see someone has written for all these other publications,
(01:17):
my first instinct was, like, that seems legit. You know,
these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to
be too suspicious.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Why would you be?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
This is kill Switch. I'm Dexterah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
I'm sorry, I'm goodbye.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
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 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 found elsewhere, So like the pitch meant a whole lot,
Like if you could tell me an awesome story in
(03:12):
a pitch, if I could see your style on the pitch,
if I could see that you had like an idea
I couldn't find elsewhere, that would go a long way.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
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 health care,
but membership medicine is basically when patients pay their doctors
directly for more premium services, and man, Victoria was on it.
(03:42):
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 universality.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
The pitch she sent it indicated that she 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 take
a shot on this person.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
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. Once you'd done stuff for American magazines,
it seemed as if she was writing as an American,
So I wondered, you know that there are people who
are international. There's no reason that you could be publishing
(05:16):
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 setting 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
(05:36):
get a story assigned. But like that much is there's
a lot that'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 could be a student
journalist and then they're reusing interviews they've done before. There's
different reasons that could happen. But that made me question
some things, so he dug a little deeper. So then
I wanted to just see what stories she'd done for
(05:59):
Canadian publics. 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 in these
papers of 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 came up. This
is where Nick starts to get really suspicious. Could Victoria
just be lying about publishing in all these different places?
(06:22):
And if she was, what else could she be lying about?
She went back to look at her pitch to see
if there was any other explanation for this. 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?
(06:44):
Doctor Daniel 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
(07:06):
real people, and they had been making up some of
their botolines in Canadian publications, and when you reread it again,
it was like there was some chat gptisms, you know,
if there was some like formulaic writing about this pitch
is important because of X, it's timely, because of why,
it's perfect for your publication, because of Z. It felt
a little When I looked at it more closely, you
(07:28):
could see some things that felt a little inhuman.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I guess, hmmm, See that's tough because I've definitely pitched
things that I've used language like that. No, totally, like
that's what you do, Like you tell, hey, I'd like
to write this, and it's timely because this is happening.
It's the anniversary of whatever. We should revisit this.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah, no, all the telles for chat GPT or whatever.
Like people say looking for M dashes and I'm so
resentful of that. I use M dashes all the time,
like it's same. So I don't know, I don't have
a good way of spawning something. But the made up
quotes and the kind of made up bylines made me
think this is what was happening.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So okay, you're starting to think that this is AI.
What do you do next?
Speaker 1 (08:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
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.
(08:52):
After Nick puts together that Victoria seems to have not
only chat GPT or pitch, but also lied about working
on other Canadians publications, he decides that he needs to
figure out how far this rabbit hole goes. He's pretty
sure he's being laed to, but he's still curious. You
didn't confront her immediately?
Speaker 1 (09:13):
No, I wanted to know a little more, did. I
did send some follow up emails. I said, like, 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 and 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
(09:35):
one I looked at was this feature from the Journal
of the Law Society of Scotland, which is like an
in depth feature that was about law firms disappearing from
the Scottish Highlands and like what were rural people doing?
And I quoted like members of parliament, I quoted a
bunch of lawyers, academics, and then a bunch of regular people.
So I was just wondering, like, this is a real article.
I couldn't find any of the regular people, you know,
(09:56):
when she begins an anecdote, like Fiona forty to a
school teacher in Glengarry or whatever, like those people google them,
can 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
(10:17):
weird is that this sounds like the kind of thing
I would say, wow, And this is 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
(10:39):
too 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 story,
and then I just kept looking. There were more. There
was a story in Dwell that quoted like ten prominent
international designers and architects, and I just started sending emails
(11:00):
to all of them, and they had not spoken to
this person.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Victoria had published work in The Guardian, in Business Insider,
New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Africa, Vogue, Philippines. I could
keep going here. This is a resume that almost any
freelance journalists would be really jealous of.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
How many articles should you have out there? I think
over two dozen. I think I've got a spreadsheet of
over two dozen articles. You made a spreadsheet I got,
I got obsessed. I don't know I was not gonna
write about this. We're a local publication that only reads
about Toronto, right, I was just doing this set 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 it sound like overly, you know, people are
(11:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
That is different. Yeah, that is different.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, 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 to three.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Like okay.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I emailed with editors of other publications and spoke to
a former editor at Pop Sugar, which had taken down
a number of articles that she'd written. So I went
online and it said that was taken down because there
inconsistencies or didn't live up to Pop Sugar standards. The
editor said that there were plagiarism issues with the stories.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So walk me through this, Like, what were you feeling
at this time?
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I felt embarrassed to begin with. I think the pitch
call was I said something about like the ways that
health and money collide and twenty twenty five and Ontario
something like that, and it felt to me like the
pitches were some large language model taken 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
(13:03):
money collide in twenty twenty five, Like I was. Yeah,
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, like I
don't know, I began to feel maybe it sounds overblown,
but like a sense of despair, Like at a certain point,
I'm tracking down all this stuff she's telling lies all
(13:25):
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 started 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?
(13:47):
Like how much of I don't know?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
You know that?
Speaker 1 (13:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Guess.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
After investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers.
He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
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 its first person stuff, and
it's all obviously all a mix 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
(14:31):
other social media that they're they may be based in Nigeria,
or at least or from Nigeria. I said, a ton
of questions for this person, so I wanted to get
them on the phone. So I so I did that,
emailed and said, let's let's chat about this piece.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Nick emails Victoria asking if he can talk more about
her article. From a freelancers standpoint, and 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 later that week.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
In the ten 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 it was a kind of surreal experience.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
What happened.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
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 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
are real journalists who had gotten in over their heads.
Were they a scammer who had just like found some
(15:37):
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 send it 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,
(16:00):
But you know, this person had had googled the street
in Toronto, so I was I was already, you know,
well done. Yeah, 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
(16:21):
she said, oh, yes, of course, my personal assistant I
actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact
that like freelance journalists don't have personal assistance. I kind of, right, yeah,
let that drift past. I asked why I couldn't find
the stories in the Walrus and the 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
(16:42):
if she 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 the stories were gone from Pop
Sugar and she said, oh, the editor moved on from
Pop Sugar, so they took down all the articles that
they worked talking with me, which is not how is
not how that works. Every question she just sort of answered,
very cheerfully, very upbeat, didn't seem to be shaken by it.
(17:06):
She had quick responses to every I mean, implausible, but
quick and ready. It's almost impressive. And then I kind
of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
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
has 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 any email since. I've
(17:35):
not heard from her since.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
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
(18:06):
removed herself from the Internet.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
In the days that followed, the x account that had
been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her mockrack page,
which is kind of a list of all a journalists
stories that went private. Her personal website went down. She
kind of disappeared after that phone call, and I say,
she I at this point, I don't not know who
(18:29):
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. Something that crossed my mind a lot for
a while, I thought maybe there's no singular person attached
(18:49):
to this name at all. Maybe it's just, you know,
one of a dozen bylines that people are using to
get paid for some writing. I don't think that's the case.
That one of the earliest stories I found under that byline,
it was a couple months before Chatgebet came out, which
is kind of the demarketing line I think, after which
like you can't trust that a sentence was written by
a human, And it was like it felt different. Those
(19:09):
early stories were there's some grammatical mistakes, they're clumsier, they're
less smooth, less slick, but they seem to represent like
a real person talking about real things.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
One article from that pre chatgpt era is from May
of twenty twenty two. 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
(19:41):
tired and trying to survive day to day.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
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
their into key dramas, they're into afrobeats. There's some continuity
of which feels like a person there. I can't know
for sure, but I think this as an individual who,
at least in those early stories, is writing about going
online like the rest of us and making her miserable
(20:06):
seeing people who are presenting themselves as doing so well,
seeing all this hustle culture and they're just struggling to
get by a day to day.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
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. So kind of can't beat them,
join them type thing.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, So in the end, like I don't know who
this person is, I have some sympathy for them.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
We published the piece, it got a crazy response, but
I think the most like telling response. All 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 was running this tiny
(21:17):
indigenous run publication said that they had just assigned a
story to her and they just, oh my god, did
a quick Google to her and they're like, thank you
so much. We were very close to sending the contract.
Someone else from this publication called Republic. They phoned me
up there 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
(21:39):
own experience living in a van in the American Southwest.
The Financial Times like around the world. This this person
was really incredibly prolific.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
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,
(22:12):
that might start to add up.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
I guess part of what's interesting to me is, I
think we were offering two thousand bucks for this story.
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 ten of the
top designers in the world, like you know that fifteen
hundred dollars, it doesn't go far. If you entered into
chat GPT and get this thing out of five minutes later,
that's a pretty good return, right.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
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,
(23:00):
how is the local change their editorial process or they're
different hoops that somebody has to jump through to submitted article.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
I mean, yeah, you 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
(23:27):
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 and 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.
(23:49):
And I think the fear is that you're just gonna
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?
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Like you can't trust anything?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah, yeah, 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 or checking through them. I
think if you had robust fact checking, like this story
(24:22):
is not getting into twelve 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 or journalism 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
(24:42):
is like already pretty broken and yeah and overworked, 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, would take more resources, it would
take journalists spending more time in that work. And we're
already at a point where like we're going in the
(25:03):
opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Right, Yeah, I mean when when you said robust fact checking,
any journalists 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.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Cut, you know.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
That's like do organizations have fact checkers, Yes, but maybe
they used to have five and 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. Yeah, And I mean this is it's interesting
because this isn't really necessarily about AI. You know, I
(25:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Exactly the scale would be impossible with it at the
efficiency I would not have heard from dozens of editors
around the world had been pitched stories that fit pretty
well into their niche Like we're kind of we're way off.
That's only possible with the technology, right, But yeah, this
is this is human beings using that technology to do
something that they've done for a while.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
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, there's important, lies or bad. I
just mean that it's getting weird.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
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 took me back, Like that that
indicates that we are part of a world where, like
(26:56):
I think we already know that a lot of people
don't mind the slap, like the slop is ever where,
because people are fine with it if it's that's 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
(27:17):
in a we're entering a whole new paradigm about like
what truth even is.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
And that is like I don't know, 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
(27:42):
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 at speed on the basics. Right,
So what's the harm in having, you know, some chatbot
fill in the blanks for them and say some things
that are pretty plausible from a few experts. The AI
models is trained on everything they've said. It knows about
(28:03):
what they're gonna say.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Yeah, I mean, this is the argument that kind of
terrifies me, right, Like, I think, to be.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
Clear, I'm not advocating for this.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
No, no, no, I know, I know, I know, I
hear you taking the point of view, Like, I mean,
first of all, they don't know what individuals say, right,
everyone is surprising, and a I 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, like I don't know, we
(28:34):
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 you know, when someone's
quoted they have to have said a thing, when when
like I feel like I'm losing my mind as we're
kind of moving away from actually recognizing that, like when
you say stuff's true, it's got to be It's got
to be true. Otherwise, what are we even? How can
(28:54):
we talk? How can we argue? How can we agree
on anything?
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, I think we were, we were in the post
truth thing already. It's like post post truth.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, I think like university professors have been here for
a while already, Like it's been a few years of
them dealing with this world. But for me personally, in
like my little corner of magazine journalism, I haven't been
confronted with it until now.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
You know, it's interesting you.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Bring that up, because I think a lot of people
are curious about how university and professors or high school
professors or whatever dealing with the fact that, yeah, a
lot of their students are probably just typing a prompt
into CHATGBT and then you know, cranking out a thousand
word essay. But that's a very controlled environment. You know,
it's a fish bowl. If somebody at the university down
the road chat gbt generates their history exam, that doesn't
(29:39):
affect me personally. But if somebody is chatgebt generating an
article about what the LAPD is doing or not doing, that.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Could affect me.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
And we're already a stage where people just straight up
don't trust journalism at all. And what do we do
if the if the writers are lying to the editors,
or the writers don't even exist.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, yeah, I have no answers. It's weighing on me.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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 chat ChiPT dropped in
November of twenty twenty two, 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
(30:32):
I can tell, seems to actually exists. 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 twenty
twenty five. 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
(30:56):
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?
Speaker 4 (31:15):
All right?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
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 there, I.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Don't think so. I don't think so. We're moving moving on,
We're moving on.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
Moving on, moving on. I dig it.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Thank you so much for checking out another episode of
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC
or on Instagram.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
We're at kill Switch Pod.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And before you move on to doing something else, maybe
think of leaving the show or a review. It helps
other 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 Shena Ozaki, Darluck Potts and
Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle Murdoch,
and Kyle also mixes a show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive
(32:11):
producers are Ozma Lashin from Geshatgadour and Kate Osborne from iHeart.
Our executive producers of Katrina Norville and Nikki E Tour
catch on next week
Speaker 4 (32:30):
Goodbye
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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