Uncovering an AI Journalist
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week we are bringing you a podcast recommendation. A great tech focused weekly show called Kill Switch, hosted by Dexter Thomas. On this episode Dexter goes down a rabbit hole. 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.
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Brian, one of the hosts of Uncanny Valley. |
| 0:03.3 | The big interview hosted by my colleague Katie Drummond is currently on break, |
| 0:07.0 | but it'll be back very soon on March 24th with brand new conversations. |
| 0:11.3 | In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, Kill Switch. |
| 0:15.9 | Hope you enjoy it. I hadn't done a pitch call out in 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. |
| 0:39.3 | It was very different than the year before. |
| 0:42.3 | Nicholas Hune Brown is the editor of The Local, which is an independent online magazine that covers social issues in Toronto. |
| 0:49.3 | Last September, they put out an open call for freelance journalists to pitch stories for their upcoming issue. |
| 0:55.5 | We were looking to assign stories about healthcare and money. |
| 0:59.0 | There's been some creeping privatization in Ontario where we live. |
| 1:03.3 | So we put out a call for pitches. |
| 1:05.1 | I posted something on Blue Sky just asking freelancers, give me a suggestion. |
| 1:09.3 | Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there was one in particular that stood out. |
| 1:14.6 | This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goldie. |
| 1:17.6 | She said in the email that she'd written for a bunch of these Canadian publications that do similar work to what we do. |
| 1:22.6 | It was a well-written pitch, I thought. |
| 1:24.6 | And when I did a quick Google of her, she had bylines and a bunch of, you know, reputable publications, The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know, when you see someone has written for all these other publications, my first instinct was like, that seems legit, you know, these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to be too suspicious. Why would you be? Yeah. But Victoria Goldie turned out not to be who she said she was, |
| 1:47.0 | and this sent Nick down a really weird rabbit hole investigation. You've heard of fake news? Well, |
| 1:53.0 | welcome to a new scam, fake journalists. From kaleidoscope and IHeart podcasts, |
| 2:02.5 | I'm afraid. |
| 2:06.9 | This is Killswitch. |
| 2:12.2 | I'm Dexter Thomas. |
... |
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