The Phantom Writer Who Fooled the Internet
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Stephen Glass
15 min read
The article explicitly references Stephen Glass as an 'obvious example' of journalism's fabricators. His case is one of the most notorious journalism fraud scandals in American history, and understanding his methods and downfall provides essential context for this new AI-enabled era of media deception.
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Content farm
8 min read
The article mentions the author initially suspected Goldiee might be 'one name out of many bylines that a content farm was using.' Understanding how content farms operate, their economics, and their impact on journalism quality directly illuminates the degraded media environment that made this fraud possible.
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Advance-fee scam
12 min read
The article reveals Goldiee is believed to be from Nigeria and draws parallels to 'other email scams.' The history of Nigerian advance-fee fraud provides fascinating context for understanding how global economic inequality drives sophisticated deception schemes targeting Western institutions.
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This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca
By Carmine Starnino and Nicholas Hune-Brown
If “[e]very media era gets the fabulists it deserves,” as Nicholas Hune-Brown writes, then such fabulists, if they’re lucky, get the profiles they merit.
Nick’s feature about the strange, sad case of “Victoria Goldiee”—a phantom writer whose spree of bylines, in publications ranging from the Guardian to Architectural Digest, have all the watermarks of chatbot prose—is the must-read piece of this closing year. With 2025 bringing flirty AI companions and lawsuits against AI giants and a looming AI bubble, his tale about the ease with which synthetic voices can now pass for human hits with the force of a horror story.
Goldiee, who claimed she had written for The Walrus, never did. She did, however, pitch a number of editors here, including me. Nick’s crack reporting revealed the bullet we dodged. But his forensic unravelling of a fraudster is also an act of profound creative counterparting, as authentic in its precisions as Goldiee’s are phony. By his example, he holds up the standard her tainted pieces—and what our ChatGPT era threatens to foist on us—can never meet.
I have known Nick for years—known and admired him both as an editor and colleague. We talked, by Zoom and later email, about what the Goldiee-ization of journalism might mean for our industry.
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Two years ago, Sports Illustrated published a batch of fictitious stories by non-existent writers. All of it was AI-generated—even the author portraits. They swiftly took the content down. It isn’t hard to find similar examples of generative fakery. So, in one sense, there’s nothing fundamentally new in what you reported. The increasingly synthetic nature of journalism is something we have to deal with and worry about all the time. But your story feels different. Why do you think the reaction to it has been so dramatic?
That’s a good question. The example of the Sports Illustrated stories is, in my mind, pretty reprehensible. But, in that case, the shell of a once great magazine decided to use AI to create stories. This is more a situation where you see publications being duped by bad actors who, aided by technology, are sneaking in stuff that appears totally made
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