INVESTIGATING A POSSIBLE SCAMMER IN JOURNALISM’S AI ERA:
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.
Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.
Not every Victoria Goldiee story I looked at raised the same questions. A writer by that name had, in fact, spoken with actor Nico Santos for a story in Vogue Philippines, according to his publicist. Others were impossible to debunk with certainty. Had Victoria actually interviewed an incredibly elusive Korean production designer for a story in Architectural Digest about how people were, apparently, redesigning their rooms to match K-dramas? I can’t say for sure, and Architectural Digest did not respond to questions about the story. A story she published in October headlined “20 iconic slang words from Black Twitter that shaped pop culture”—which was syndicated across dozens of small-town American newspapers desperate for content, from northeast Mississippi to Waynesville, North Carolina—contains lines like “‘Brazy’ is another word for ‘crazy,’ replacing the ‘c’ with a ‘b.’” Is that story written by AI? It’s impossible to know and, frankly, impossible to say if it even matters.
My favourite “Victoria Goldiee” story is a piece she published in The Guardian just last month. It’s a first-person essay without quotes, and thus difficult to fact-check. In it, Goldiee—who told me she lives in Toronto, writes as an American in other work, enthuses about the daily jollof specials at a restaurant in Ghana in yet other writing, and lists herself as based in Nigeria elsewhere—vividly describes discovering underground music as she moves through life in 21st-century England. It follows her from a Somali football league in east London to “Morley’s fried chicken shops lit up after midnight” and “community centres that smell of carpet cleaner and curry.” It’s a rousing argument that real culture happens in real spaces, between real human beings, not in some cold, computer-generated reality. “The future of our music,” it reads, “is not written by algorithm.”
“Wonderful article,” reads one of many approving comments.
“Beautiful message that a lot of people aren’t trudging wide-eyed and brain-dead through this increasingly soulless, corporate-heavy… modern world,” reads another. “They are socialising, communicating, loving and laughing and making culture like real, thinking, feeling human beings.”
In the days after our conversation, Victoria’s online writer’s portfolio vanished. Her Muck Rack page (a listing of a journalist’s published works) was switched to private. An X account with her handle that had shared previous stories disappeared.
As I emailed the editors of the publications I’d been investigating, one by one Victoria’s articles came down.
Between “journalists” pushing out AI slop, and foreign rage farmers being exposed on social media, the Dead Internet Theory is looking less and less like a conspiracy theory every day.