If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it’s WIRED.
In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly. We report often and aggressively on AI slop and its effects on the media and other industries. And we’re privileged to have a team of brilliant fact-checkers as part of our newsroom.
Unfortunately, one got through. On April 7, one of our editors received an email with the subject line “PITCH: ‘Do You Take This Discord Server?’—The Rise of Hyper-Niche Internet Weddings.” It had all the hallmarks of a great WIRED story: a quirky internet subculture, fun visual potential, and a larger point about “love, community, and identity in an era where physical spaces often feel less ‘real’ than our digital ones.”
You couldn’t make a better WIRED pitch if you built it in a lab. Or in this case, with the help of a large language model chatbot.
After some standard back-and-forth about framing and payment rates, our editor assigned the story. The edit process also raised no alarms; the writer accepted suggestions and responded to notes promptly and amiably. We published the story on May 7.
Over the next several days, it became clear that the writer was unable to provide enough information to be entered into our payments system. They instead insisted on payment by PayPal or check. Now suspicious, a WIRED editor ran the story through two third-party AI-detection tools, both of which said that the copy was likely to be human-generated. A closer look at the details of the story, though, along with further correspondence from the writer, made it clear to us that the story had been an AI fabrication. After more due diligence from the head of our research desk, we retracted the story and replaced it with an editor’s note.
We made errors here: This story did not go through a proper fact-check process or get a top edit from a more senior editor. First-time contributors to WIRED should generally get both, and editors should always have full confidence that writers are who they say they are.
Fabulists and plagiarists are as old as media itself. But AI presents a new challenge. It lets anyone craft a perfect pitch with a simple prompt and play-act the role of journalist convincingly enough to fool, well, us. We acted quickly once we discovered the ruse, and we’ve taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again. In this new era, every newsroom should be prepared to do the same.
