Several news organizations, including Wired and Business Insider, have taken down features that may have been entirely works of fiction written by an AI “freelancer,” the Press Gazette reported Thursday.
Using the byline Maraux Blanchard, the writer published articles in several U.S. and U.K. publications including Index on Censorship, a freedom-of-expression nonprofit. The publisher of that site acknowledged to the Press Gazette that the submission “appears to have been written by AI.”
The byline was first used in April. Most of the works under that name quoted or referenced people whose identity the Press Gazette was unable to verify.
They were brought to the Press Gazette’s attention by Jacob Furedi, editor of Dispatch, a subscription-based publication dedicated to longform reporting. Furedi said he received a pitch this month from Blanchard regarding a rural Colorado town repurposed into a secretive training ground for death investigations.
Furedi said he was familiar with the topic of secret training sites, and immediately thought the pitch sounded like it was written ChatGPT. Having never heard of the Colorado site, Furedi asked the writer about how she came to find it, later determined on his own that it didn’t exist, and began to believe the whole thing was “absolute bollocks.”
Further questioning of the writer – who wanted about $675 for the piece and said she would spend up to a week reporting on the ground – brought up more suspicions. When he finally confronted her about fabricating the story, she stopped replying.
The Press Gazette said it found at least six publications that published articles under the Margaux Blanchard byline; four of those have removed the stories and a fifth said it was investigating.
Wired had published an article under Blanchard’s name about couples getting married in online meeting spaces, and took it down two weeks later. The Press Gazette said interviewees did not match any actual people.
Business Insider published a pair of first-person essays by Blanchard, one of them about remote work. Another was titled “I had my first kid at 45. I’m financially stable and have years of life experience to guide me.”
Hours after the Post Gazette flagged the articles on Tuesday, they were taken down and replaced with editor’s notes saying they did not meet standards.
Index on Censorship published a Blanchard-bylined piece about challenges faced by journalists in Guatemala; it also cites named experts whom the Press Gazette could not identify as being real people.
“Index has warned for a long time of the dangers of AI impersonating people, and its threat to journalism,” the site told the Press Gazette. “We have sadly become the victim of the very thing we’ve warned against.”
Another removed story was published by U.K. indie art and music magazine Cone, a reported piece on streetwear brands. Yet another, about Disneyland superfans, appeared in SFGate; it was also replaced with an editor’s note.
