Fake journalist

Karl Bode at Techdirt tells Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist:

The freelancer, who called herself Margaux Blanchard, apparently doesn’t exist. She pitched both outlets on a story about a town called Gravemont, “a decommissioned mining town in rural Colorado” that was purportedly repurposed into “one of the world’s most secretive training grounds for death investigation.” Except the town in question, like the author, apparently doesn’t exist.

The fake journalist isn’t a new thing. Newsrooms have had processes to perform due diligence and fact checcking for long time. Or used to. Outlets like Business Insider have been going hard on replacing writers and editors with AI, because what’s important in the C-suite isn’t the people or integrity. However Wired seems to still have higher standard. Except when they don’t follow them.

Anyway. We have pre-LLM content and post-LLM content. The AI tech-bros ruined it all.