Roblog

Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Local exhibits more diligence than most publications in tracking down the source of an AI-written pitch:

“I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where ‘health and money collide,’ flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.”

Such grubby scams are, he thinks, reflective of the diminished media environment we live in:

“Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud – where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more ‘content’ have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.”

Immunisation against these sorts of scams and misinformation is possible, as Hune-Brown demonstrates with his dogged investigative work. But the skills needed are precisely the ones that the media have spent the last decade or two gutting. It does not bode well.