From fake AI journalism to very real lives: An anatomy of a scoop
Last week I wrote a wild story that began with an AI-generated pitch about warring London chicken shops and ended with a video call to Nairobi with the man who had willed it into existence. Wilson Kaharua – working under the alias Joseph Wales – was not a criminal mastermind but a small-time SEO writer put out of work by AI.
My story opened up an ethical can of worms. Kaharua, who had successfully placed at least one other bogus story in a publication and had used AI to help write several others, was convinced what he was doing was not unethical. “I have to try,” he told me. “I’m not a scammer, I’m just doing what I have to to survive… I’m not a bad person.”
And after talking to him, I kind of agree. He’s not a bad person. He’s a nice chap, in fact. Smart, articulate, charming. But he is also wilfully contributing to what my article termed “the growing fatberg of hallucinated slop that, day-by-day, makes up a larger and larger proportion of the internet”.
I debated whether or not to tip off the publication that had run the Joseph Wales story, which was, by Kaharua’s own admission, a work of “pure fiction”. I’d certainly want to know if someone had slipped a fictitious essay into the pages of Morning Wire. But it’s different when you’ve formed something approaching a relationship with someone and you know how far the commission fee will go in Nairobi.
This practice isn’t just embarrassing for editors like me and disrespectful to readers like you. It pollutes the entire media ecosystem.
In the end I did contact the owner of the website, who was grateful for the heads-up and promptly delisted the article (to be fair, it should never have made it into print: a detection tool predicted at least 85 per cent of the story had been generated by AI).
This is the kind of conversation that’s likely to arise more and more over the coming weeks and months, as generative AI becomes more powerful and believable.
I had a conversation over LinkedIn with the freelance writer Rob Waugh, who had interviewed an Africa-based “SEO guy” operating the account of a fake psychologist providing quotes to national newspapers. Waugh told me a lot of dodgy SEO agencies used to employ copywriters from Africa or eastern Europe, where the dollar goes relatively far. They would generate cheap, bogus content to help game the Google algorithm. When AI put them out of a job, many, like Kaharua, turned to AI to earn their money instead.
This practice isn’t just embarrassing for editors like me and disrespectful to readers like you. It pollutes the entire media ecosystem. For the Joseph Wales story, I spoke to Dispatch Media founder Jacob Furedi, who broke a similar (and better) story about a writer called Margaux Blanchard, who had been published in outlets including Wired and Business Insider. Furedi had received a similar email to my chicken shop pitch, his involving a decommissioned mining town turned macabre training facility involving real human corpses. It was, of course, entirely fictional, as was its author.
Furedi thinks the big losers in all this could be newer, younger freelance writers. “It’s obviously irritating for editors and it’s discourteous to readers, but it’s a real shame for freelancers. There might be a tendency for editors to just use people they already know and trust,” he told me.
Journalism is already in a tough spot. Freelance rates have remained virtually flat for decades, meaning, in real terms, writers earn less and less with every passing year. And as organisations shed staff in a bid to remain profitable (or at least lose a little less money) there are more and more people competing for every writing gig. Editors losing trust in new writers could be catastrophic: we get fewer new voices and journalism as a whole gets weaker, creating a miserable feedback loop.
Is what I’m doing ethical journalism?
There is also a wider question that every journalist has asked themselves at one point or another: is what I’m doing ethical? There’s a quote by the journalist and author Janet Malcolm that I think about often:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson.”
Was it really fair to out Kaharua, a man eking out a living in a Nairobi village, as a fraud in the pursuit of a story? I didn’t deceive him – he was aware we were speaking on the record, that I was recording the conversation, that I was writing a story based on his made up pitches. But I played on his vanity and, perhaps, his naivety. At very least he now has to go to the expense of setting up a new fraudulent persona.
When I first published the story, Kaharua replied saying he hadn’t read it yet (to be fair, it is 4,400 words) but that it looked like “a character assassination”. This felt harsh: I’d gone out of my way to present him fairly. I tried to put it in terms he would understand: I asked ChatGPT “How does Wilson come across in this article?” Here’s what it said:
“Wilson (or “Joseph Wales”) comes across as a layered and contradictory figure – part hustler, part victim of circumstance, part trickster, part everyman caught in a tidal shift of technology.
“On one hand, he is presented as deceptive: using a fake English-sounding name, stock photos, fabricated résumés and AI-generated pitches. On the other hand, the piece humanises him. Once unmasked, Wilson in Nairobi is portrayed as intelligent, charming, likeable even… He is not framed as a hardened scammer but as someone trying to survive in a world where AI has abruptly hollowed out his livelihood.
“The narrative leaves the reader with a sense of ambivalence. Wilson is at once a cautionary tale and a sympathetic character. He represents the precariousness of freelance creative work in the age of AI: the dislocation, the erosion of trust, the temptation to cut corners, and the moral greyness of doing what one must to stay afloat.”
Part of me hates how good this AI summary is. How long before it really is indistinguishable from a human writer?
In the end, Kaharua seemed unfazed. “I’ve just finished it and it’s hilarious as it is true. Well put,” he said. The subject of this story seems less burdened by his 15 minutes of fame than the person who offered it to him in the first place.