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I sat through a really interesting webinar last Wednesday about fake AI-generated experts, hosted by Qwoted and featuring a reporter from the Press Gazette in the UK, who has been keeping an eye on the trend of fake experts getting quoted in many publications. 

Rob Waugh, one of the writers leading the research, joined the discussion and said that, in the Press Gazette’s analysis of UK outlets (a total of 250 outlets, unpaywalled), 1 in 10 expert-led articles cited fake experts. 

The publication actually put together a really good list of fake experts that you should reference, especially if you do any kind of commerce reporting or work, where you’re required to quote people like “gardening experts” or “cleaning experts.”

Another resource that Qwoted offers to help you spot AI experts is here, and it’s really robust.

One of the key ways we can avoid falling prey to this, as responsible journalists, is to conduct all our interviews over the phone or via Zoom (or another video platform). While these can still be spoofed, they’re much harder to fake or hack.

I know that sometimes, due to time shifting or deadlines, we have to resort to email interviews, but if that happens, please make sure you run all quotes through an AI detector and verify that this person exists. Ask me how I know….(more on this below).

Pangram is a good AI detector that Qwoted uses. I hadn’t heard of it. I tend to run any pitches or responses to my queries through GPTZero or ZeroGPT. Or I reverse engineer and use an AI to find validating information about something or someone that doesn’t pass the smell test. While I don’t rely on it as final approval (or disapproval), it can help you track down more details about whether these are real or fake experts or companies. 

These fake experts are after something, too. Namely, SEO and GEO rankings. If you don’t know what GEO is, please search it. As a high-level journalist, you need to know how what you’re producing is impacting  (and being used to impact) AI search.  If an expert shows up as highly ranked, it conveys “authority,” and there's a pretty vast financial upside to this. Keep in mind that this can also be used to manipulate elections and create false narratives about, say, the war in Ukraine, for example. 

A lot of this problem stems from newsrooms where people are under the gun, and young reporters are not empowered to check if something is real or not. The good news is that many newsrooms are taking this very seriously and putting some guardrails in place.

While I feel like this is really, really obvious, it bears repeating: Ask every new-to-you expert for a call when doing your reporting. If they can be available within a few days or hours, they’re real. If they make up some outlandish excuse to completely avoid you,  that should be a warning sign. 

Funny enough, I had one of my first run-ins with a PR person who used AI to answer a number of questions I emailed her, because her president was unavailable due to travel and time off.

I was astounded, especially because this was coming from a well-known charity group deeply involved in many company programs across the country.

I read through what she sent me, and it didn’t pass my sniff test, so I ran her email through both Pangram and ZeroGPT.

Guess what? Both came back as 95% AI created. I immediately told my editor, and he pushed the organization to schedule a live Zoom interview with me.

Mind you, the org has avoided our emails since…and clearly I won’t be using this interview or this person as an expert.

Just be warned.

Freelance, contract, and part-time roles are a bit slim this week, but there are some great opportunities, including:

Full-Time work this week is huge. The New York Times is on a huge hiring spree and just posted 15+ new roles this morning. Other work includes jobs at:

The Dishonorable roles are pretty bad this week, and if you are interested in protecting factual information on the web, have a Passion Project for you.

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