Uncovering an AI Journalist

15:22Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 awful iceberg was dispiriting, I guess.

15:36Dexter Thomas:After investigating all of this past work, Nick needed some answers. He finally decided that he was ready to confront Victoria.

15:45Nicholas Hune-Brown:I wanted to talk to her. I had so many questions about who this person really is. As I'm in this world, I'm reading their writing, right? and some of it's first person stuff. And it's 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 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.

16:18Dexter 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 later that week.

16:37Nicholas 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. What happened? 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 in over their heads?

17:09Nicholas Hune-Brown: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. And 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, Bloor, 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 Googled the street in Toronto. So I was already, you know, well done. And then I kind of just walked them through some of the inconsistencies.

17:45Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 personal assistant actually spoke with her. I didn't press on the fact that like 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.

18:17Nicholas Hune-Brown:I asked 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 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 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. It's almost impressive. And then I kind of moved on to the bigger inconsistencies, right?

18:49Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 was gone, that she'd hung up. She's not responded to any email since. I've not heard from her sons.

19:12Dexter 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.

19:38Dexter Thomas:After that phone call, Victoria quietly removed herself from the internet.

19:43Nicholas Hune-Brown:In the days that followed, the X account that had been posting some stuff under her name disappeared. Her muckrack page, which is kind of a list of all the journalist's stories that went private. But 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 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. For a while, I thought maybe there's no singular person attached to this name at all.

20:25Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 like a real person talking about real things.

20:54Dexter Thomas:One article from that pre-Chat GPT 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.

21:19Nicholas 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.

21:50Dexter 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. So kind of can't beat them, join them type thing. Yeah.

22:09Nicholas Hune-Brown:So in the end,

22:10Dexter Thomas:like, I don't know who this person is. I have some sympathy for them. 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.

22:29Nicholas Hune-Brown:We published the piece. It got a crazy response. But I think the most 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 everywhere. 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 sending the contract. Someone else from this publication called Republic, they phoned me up there in the middle of a second draft with her.

23:07Nicholas Hune-Brown: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.

23:25Dexter 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 asked 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. I guess part of what's interesting to me is I think we were offering 2000 bucks for this story.

23:54Nicholas Hune-Brown:That's that's our rate. Dwell paid, you know, I think she got$1 ,500 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$1 ,500 doesn't go far. But if you enter it into ChatGPT and get this thing out five minutes later, that's a pretty good return, right?

24:12Dexter 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 is the local change their editorial process are there different hoops that somebody has to jump through to submit an article i mean yeah it it

24:43Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 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.

25:13Nicholas Hune-Brown: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. It 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? You can't trust anything. Yeah. Yeah. So I am doing more phone calls earlier in the process with writers.

25:43Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 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 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 - Yeah, and overworked.

26:21Nicholas 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 like, we're going in the opposite direction, right? Yeah.

26:40Dexter Thomas:I mean, 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 cut. You know, 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 hate to echo the AI boosters here. Right. But this is something that's often said.

27:17Dexter Thomas:AI is a tool. And this is somebody who and maybe multiple somebodies who are using just a tool that is more efficient.

27:26Nicholas Hune-Brown:Exactly. The scale would be impossible with 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 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.

27:47Dexter 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.

28:08Nicholas 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?

28:43Nicholas Hune-Brown: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 of like what truth even is. And that is like, I don't know.

29:01Dexter 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, you know, some chat bot 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.

29:40Nicholas Hune-Brown:Yeah. I mean, this is the argument that kind of terrifies me, right? Like, I think... To be clear, I'm not advocating for this. No, no, no, I know, I know, I know. I hear you taking the AI point of view. Like, I mean, 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, like, 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, you know, when someone's quoted, they have to have said a thing 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 true.

30:28Nicholas Hune-Brown:Otherwise, what are we even, how can we talk? How can we argue? How can we agree on anything?

30:33Dexter Thomas:Yeah, I think we were in the post-truth thing already. It's like post-post-truth.

30:38Nicholas Hune-Brown: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.

30:50Dexter 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 cranking out a thousand word essay. But that's a very controlled environment. 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 chat gbt 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 if the writers are lying to the editors or the writers don't even exist

31:39Nicholas Hune-Brown:yeah yeah yeah i have no answers it's a it's it's weighing on me

31:47Dexter 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.

32:29Dexter Thomas: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 there... I don't think so. I don't think so. We're moving on. We're moving on. Moving on. Moving on.

33:09Dexter 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 at kaleidoscope.nyc or on Instagram, we're at killswitchpod. And before we move on to doing something else, maybe think of leaving the show a review. It helps other people find the show, which in turn helps us keep doing our thing. Killswitch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Dara Luke 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 Oz Willashin, Mangesh Hatikadur, and Kate Osborne.

33:51Dexter Thomas:From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor. Catch y 'all next week.

34:05Dexter Thomas:Goodbye.

34:11Nicholas Hune-Brown:What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.