Renowned publications including Wired and Business Insider have been caught publishing what appears to be AI slop.

As Press Gazette reports in a fascinating investigation, numerous outlets have removed features published under the byline of “Margaux Blanchard” after suspicion emerged that the stories were fictionalized and AI-generated.

After Press Gazette reached out to the non-profit Index on Censorship over an article by the same author, for instance, the publisher concluded that the piece “appears to have been written by AI.”

It’s an especially galling situation for Wired, a publication that routinely features excellent coverage about how generative AI is slowly drowning the internet in uninspired slop, often undermining human creativity in the process.

It’s unclear how much money the person behind the ruse got away with, but considering that Wired sometimes pays thousands of dollars for in-depth, long-form reporting, it could be a considerable sum.

One thing’s for sure: the incident is very much a sign of the times. As AI tech progresses, chatbots are becoming incredibly adept at generating believable-sounding copy. In this case, human editors at reputable publications appear to have fallen victim to a scammer.

We’ve already come across many examples of publications falling for similar traps, and even media conglomerates accelerating the trend by pumping AI slop into newspapers firsthand.

Unsurprisingly, both Business Insider and Wired moved swiftly by deleting the offending content from their websites.

“The essay ‘Remote work has been the best thing for me as a parent but the worst as a person’ was removed because it didn’t meet Business Insider‘s standards,” reads an August 19 editor’s note where the article used to be.

And an editor’s note where Wired had previously published “They Fell in Love Playing Minecraft. Then the Game Became Their Wedding Venue” cautions that the story was taken down as it “does not meet our editorial standards.”

In many ways, the title of the piece perfectly meshes with Wired‘s usual coverage, making it a suitable pitch for the tech publication — a quirky and otherwise harmless love story taking place inside a digital world.

A quick perusal of an archived version of the since-deleted article reveals a tidily written piece about two individuals falling in love while playing the iconic video game. However, a closer look reveals several telltale signs of the piece having been generated by an AI, including already familiar sentence structures.

The piece also references a 34-year-old ordained officiant in Chicago who doesn’t appear to exist.

The story continued to spread online. Wired‘s piece was aggregated by several other publications, including Mashable, whose associate editor, Tim Marcin, characterized it as a “charming feature” in a commentary piece that has since been replaced by a similar editor’s note.

Meanwhile, Business Insider published two personal essays under the same byline, just two days apart. One of them, an extremely generic piece about becoming a parent that was first published in April, is still available on the Dutch localization of the news site.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this,” the alleged author wrote. “There is no perfect time to become a parent. There is only the time that life gives you and what you choose to do with it.”

Dispatch editor Jacob Furedi told Press Gazette about his own experience of being pitched by the same author. The pitch, an intriguing story about a rural town in Colorado that was repurposed into the “world’s most secretive training grounds for death investigation,” turned out to be impossible to independently verify.

The pitch raised alarm bells for Furedi, who found no evidence of the town’s existence. While “very convincing,” Furedi was convinced Blanchard was “bullshitting,” he told Press Gazette.

Several other magazines have also been caught publishing articles under the alleged writer’s byline, including music publication Cone Magazine and even SFGate, an award-winning Californian news publication with tens of millions of monthly readers.

An article about how superfandom of Disneyland goes from “hobby to an obsession” remains live on SFGate‘s website at the time of writing. The article mentions a TikTok content creator named Kayla Reed — with “over 100,000 followers” — who doesn’t appear to exist.

Though the impacted publications have been acting responsibly by taking down the shoddy articles, the stakes for the future of journalism are enormous.

For one, trust in what we read online is actively being eroded by the tech. Last year, a study by researchers at the University of Kansas found that when readers know AI was involved in news production, the trust and credibility they hold in the source falls.

Separate research by the independent organization Trusting News found that AI disclosures by newsrooms can hurt trust as well.

Furedi told Press Gazette that he’s already being inundated by “pitches which are clearly written by ChatGPT.”

It’s a “terrible” trend, he said, that’s “symptomatic of the direction that certain types of journalism are going in.”

More on AI journalism: AI Is Slitting the Throat of the Journalism Industry

The post Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist appeared first on Futurism.

Origianl Creator:Victor Tangermann
Original Link: https://futurism.com/wired-business-insider-ai-articles
Originally Posted: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:11:11 +0000