Speed, hoaxes and mistrust: How AI is transforming freelance journalism

A spate of articles by a freelance journalist named Margaux Blanchard appeared in major English-language publications in 2025. But the pieces, including first-person essays for Business Insider and a WIRED feature on couples getting married in the Minecraft game, were not what they appeared to be. Margaux Blanchard didn’t exist.

After an editor grew suspicious of a strange-sounding pitch and challenged Blanchard, it became clear that the work published under that name was most likely AI-generated. One by one, the outlets which had published the pieces took them down.

A few months after the ‘Margaux Blanchard’ story, another would-be freelance journalist was caught using AI to generate pitches and pieces, which again were published in major news outlets. This time, the articles were under the name ‘Victoria Goldiee’. 

These cases are the most extreme scenarios. However, they still pose serious questions about the way the freelancing system has worked until now. Calls for pitches rely on trust: that the journalist is who they say they are, that they’re doing the work themselves. 

How are commissioning editors navigating an environment where anybody can generate an AI alter ego and produce articles at the push of a prompt? On the other hand, how is the ease with which text and images can be created affecting freelancers themselves?

With these questions in mind, I put out an open call to our audience in the hope of hearing from freelancers and commissioning editors on how their day-to-day is changing because of GenAI.

A total of 45 freelance journalists and commissioning editors responded.

The responses surprised me, with many more freelancers than I expected writing in to say that GenAI has helped make them more organised and efficient. There were still some sceptics. But the overall picture was one of an industry slowly adopting GenAI, albeit with caution and caveats.

Freelance work is mutating, not disappearing

There was no consensus over whether commissions had increased or decreased since the popularisation of GenAI. 

Some of the freelancers I heard from attribute a decline in work to AI, while others say they receive more commissions precisely due to the rise of AI. Still others don’t believe the decline they’re experiencing is due to AI, and some note that there has been no change at all.

Many freelancers use AI to organise and speed up their workflows, citing help in research, planning, transcription and, in some cases, drafting articles. Some were enthusiastic about the new opportunities GenAI affords them.

“The arrival of tools like ChatGPT has drastically reduced the waiting time between one story and the next. In my position, I’m responsible for writing stories during the morning press conference of Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and being able to handle the process in real time is incredible with support like AI,” said Jesús García Rodríguez, a freelance digital editor who writes for Mexican outlet El Mañana. 

“For me, it's opened up a whole world of opportunities,” wrote media innovation journalist Ulrike Langer. These include writing about GenAI, using it to venture into new fields such as coding, and employing it as a personal research and editing assistant to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Efficiency was cited by many journalists as a key benefit to their work.

“The speed at which I do my pitches has increased, and they are more tight and catchy. This makes editors pick them faster,” said Robert Amalemba, a freelance writer based in Kenya. 

In several cases, the freelancers who reported using GenAI said automating some of the grunt work allowed them to focus more on editorial decisions and big picture thinking.

“It is now part of my daily workflow for research, structuring ideas and early drafts, allowing me to focus more on analysis, editorial judgement and narrative decisions. Productivity has increased, along with expectations around speed,” said Alvaro Liuzzi, an Argentinian freelance journalist, media consultant and trainer.

A survey of UK journalists, both freelance and not, found that more journalists use AI for initial newsgathering than for other stages of the news production process. In terms of individual tasks, the ones in which journalists are most likely to use AI are transcription and captioning, translation and grammar checking, all of which are not new areas for automation.

However, as this survey was conducted between August and November 2024, and AI has kept evolving at a fast pace since then, the overall picture might be different today.

However, this increase in speed has led to the expectation that work be completed more quickly, with several freelancers noting that tighter turnarounds are requested of them as well. 

In some cases, this has also led to lower budgets for freelance work, according to Arif Ullah Sheikh, a current affairs producer at Pakistan Television Corporation and freelance SEO content writer and editor. This is because some work is partially automated instead of being assigned to a freelancer, and also because of lower freelance rates due to an expectation that, since freelancers will use GenAI, they will take less time on the job, Sheikh said.

“The number of thought leadership pieces I am commissioned to write on behalf of brands and C-suite execs has collapsed. My suspicion is that these pieces are simply farmed out to GenAI tools,” said Chris Sutcliffe, a UK-based freelance tech and media journalist.

Verification becomes more important 

Widespread use of GenAI has also amplified the importance of verification to check for hallucinations and other errors in output. But having to comb through AI-generated work for possible mistakes can sometimes neutralise the time savings of automating that work in the first place.

Freelance journalist Sophie Mangado, based in Canada, wrote that she occasionally uses AI to save time in research. “The counterpart to this is I have to double-check any result from GenAI, and this takes time,” she said.

“I use them only for topics I know perfectly, and even in those cases I double-check,” wrote Elisa Gestri, freelance journalist and photoreporter, who worries about the trustworthiness of AI outputs after noticing some mistakes. 

For a profession that relies on accuracy and in which retaining audience trust is already a struggle, some freelancers voiced concern that overreliance on AI may lead to damaging shortcuts. 

“This technology is reshaping research processes that require care. Some outlets and clients assume that ‘everything is faster’ and push for short deadlines or lower fees, without distinguishing between mechanical tasks and deep intellectual work. That devalues the profession and risks leading to inaccuracies. The most dangerous thing is the temptation to produce ‘cheap’ content without reporting or solid verification. That’s what worries me most,” wrote Hassel Fallas, a freelance journalist and editor based in Costa Rica.

How to catch an impostor

One of the risks faced by commissioning editors is the possibility of a flood of AI-generated pitches clogging up their inboxes, making it difficult to sift through and find good stories. 

The worst-case scenario is falling for an AI scammer.

Nicholas Hune-Brown, executive editor at nonprofit publication The Local, based in Toronto, was the one who discovered that Victoria Goldiee was lying about her work. 

He became suspicious after her pitch to him seemed a bit too polished. She also claimed to have already done a lot of the groundwork for the piece she was pitching, which struck Hune-Brown as strange.

He googled her and found a wide variety of recent articles she had authored for disparate publications, including Architectural Digest and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. Her work seemed to suggest she lived in the US or the UK, but The Local is a Toronto publication.

Hune-Brown dug deeper, getting in touch with people Goldiee claimed to have interviewed, and found her articles featured quotes from real experts who didn’t remember speaking with her, or experts who didn’t appear to exist. 

When he put this to Goldiee on a phone call, the voice on the other end hung up. Goldiee stopped responding to his emails.

“This experience has totally shifted the way that we do our work,” Hune-Brown told me. The Local is now implementing a more robust fact-checking process, including asking authors for annotated drafts as evidence that they’re doing the writing.

This additional vetting step was also mentioned by one of the freelancers who got in touch to share their experience.

Chris Sutcliffe said he’s been offering editors access to his Google Docs version histories as evidence that he does the writing himself. He believes this is helping him get work. “Just offering proof of original work appears to be a selling point for freelance journalism,” he said. 

Rising scepticism from editors could create additional obstacles for young journalists or those just getting into the business, as editors look beyond a pitch to a writer’s previous bylines or contacts, for example, before assigning them a job.

“I am not so worried about a totally fraudulent article making its way through onto our pages,” Hune-Brown said, pointing to his publication’s vetting process. However, he is also concerned about how to fulfil The Local’s mandate to work with new voices.

“I'm not sure the best process for doing that at a moment where you cannot assume any connection between the words of a pitch you receive and the person who sent it,” he said.

This worry about whether or not to trust the expertise signalled by well-written pitches was also mentioned by commissioning editors who wrote in with their experience. The barrier to entry is lower, as GenAI makes everyone sound like an expert.

For the moment, Hune-Brown is only working with writers he knows. “I haven't put out another public call for pitches yet,” he said, “because I don't want to wade through dozens and dozens of AI-generated pitches.”

Will AI replace us?

Many of the freelancers said they use GenAI to aid their work. However, there was a group that saw it as a threat to their job security or as incompatible with journalistic values.

“I notice a lot of generative text on news portals, and that makes me feel two things: sorrow for colleagues who are being pushed to be faster than Twitter (impossible) and jaded that it has become the norm. I’m not a fan of AI in humanities,” wrote freelance writer Emil Čančar, who said he only uses ChatGPT as an advanced search engine, when he does at all.

Justine Pilmis, a British freelance illustrator, said she’s getting fewer job opportunities because of AI. “Progressively, I see recurring clients start to post AI-generated content rather than hiring an illustrator to do the job,” she wrote.

She’s also seeing more and more clients asking her to use AI-generated images as a reference for an illustration.

“This hinders my creative process because I have to create based on a set style, while before it would be a discussion between the client and me, often with a moodboard. A few months ago, I was commissioned by an author to design their book cover from an AI image they generated; they wanted the cover to be as close as possible to the AI style, so I found myself spending hours learning to draw like an AI,” she said.

A third of UK illustrators and 58% of photographers report lost commissions and cancelled projects due to GenAI, according to a report published in January.

A couple of the writers who responded to our open call also shared concerns that GenAI could replace their work.

“Publications are commissioning fewer pieces, cutting their rates, or cancelling recurring contracts due to decreasing pageviews because readers are turning to AI, rather than publications, for information. I have maintained my work so far, but at decreasing rates, more instability, the threat of future further cutbacks, and much more hustle per assignment,” wrote US-based freelance science journalist Sarah Scoles.

“In my case, it has been hard to adapt; I feel it’s a betrayal of my intellect. By using [GenAI], I’m helping to normalise something that could later leave me without work,” wrote Mexico-based freelance writer Adriana Cruz Toledo.

The Reuters Institute's report on UK journalists’ use of AI finds that many more journalists see AI as a large threat to journalism than as a large opportunity. However, 45% of respondents said they saw AI as an opportunity to some extent.

Although there was no overall consensus on the impact of GenAI on the number of commissions to the freelancers who got in touch, and many of them praised the tech’s impact on their efficiency, a number of them also emphasised the importance of human input.

This was mentioned particularly in relation to verification, editorial judgement, and ethics.

Argentinian freelance editor Eric Facundo Fernández said, “It’s unacceptable that human writers are not behind the work [GenAI] produces, whether as a supervisor of the final version of the article or whatever is being carried out.”

“Rather than replacing my role, generative AI has reinforced the value of human editorial responsibility,” Liuzzi said.