{"id":378032,"date":"2025-08-27T16:12:18","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T16:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378032\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T16:12:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T16:12:18","slug":"in-search-of-the-rogue-ai-reporters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378032\/","title":{"rendered":"In search of the rogue AI reporters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\tWednesday 27 August 2025 3:56 pm<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a0Updated:\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tWednesday 27 August 2025 5:06 pm\n\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tShare<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"social-share__popup-item\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tFacebook\t\t\t\t\t\tShare on Facebook\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class=\"social-share__popup-item\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tX\t\t\t\t\t\tShare on Twitter\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class=\"social-share__popup-item\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tLinkedIn\t\t\t\t\t\tShare on LinkedIn\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class=\"social-share__popup-item\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tWhatsApp\t\t\t\t\t\tShare on WhatsApp\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class=\"social-share__popup-item\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\tEmail\t\t\t\t\t\tShare on Email\n\t\t\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img width=\"742\" height=\"494\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-15.50.01.png\" class=\"media \" alt=\"\" fetchpriority=\"high\" loading=\"eager\" decoding=\"sync\"  \/>\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>The \u2018customer\u2019 in the fried chicken shop didn\u2019t touch his meal. Instead, he photographed the kitchen door\u2019s keypad and left. \u2018Corporate spy,\u2019 muttered the cashier before showing me three identical incidents caught on his security cameras.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is the opening line of a pitch I received from a writer called Joseph Wales, entitled \u201cLondon\u2019s Fried Chicken Wars: Espionage, Betrayal and Social Media Sabotage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wales promised that after \u201csix weeks of undercover investigation\u201d he could shine a light on the murky, sometimes violent world in which temporary staff turn out to be spies from rival chains, social media feeds are regularly flamed by troll armies and fake mystery shoppers plant dead flies in rival stores.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>These claims could be backed up, he said, by FOI requests to local councils, screenshots from private Whatsapp groups and police reports linking chicken shops from Brixton to Tottenham with organised crime. He even claimed that, during his investigation, a restaurant manager handed him a napkin with a scrawled warning: \u201cBe careful who you eat with.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the kind of pitch that grabs you by the shirt collar. It has it all: colour, characters, a sense of place. It examines something niche but speaks to something wider. The only problem? It was completely made up.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>It\u2019s the kind of pitch that grabs you by the shirt collar. The only problem? It was completely made up<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It didn\u2019t take long for alarm bells to start ringing. Why would a restaurant manager write his sinister message on a napkin, where it could be used as evidence, rather than simply growling it in a menacing fashion? Wales claimed he was sitting in a branch of Chicken Cottage in Stratford \u2013 but there is no Chicken Cottage in Stratford. The more I looked into the story, the more absurd it all seemed.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I went back through the pitch and immediately spotted the tell-tale signs: numbered headers divided into bullet points. Pertinent words bolded up. Em dashes scattered liberally throughout. This was the work of AI. When I called him out on this, Wales admitted using AI in his pitch but assured me he would never use it to write or research his stories. I asked him to jump on a call: radio silence.<\/p>\n<p>Usually at this point I would delete the pitch and move on. But there was something about Joseph Wales that niggled at me, a feeling that there was more to this story. So I started to dig. And soon this bogus pitch about warring London chicken shops had led me on a trail across the globe, from East Africa to Chicago, revealing a bigger, sadder story about the lives we lead on the internet. It\u2019s a story about how AI is coming for people\u2019s jobs \u2013 and how those people are using AI to fight back. But most of all it\u2019s about how AI isn\u2019t only changing the world: it\u2019s also making it the same, but more.<\/p>\n<p>At first I thought Joseph Wales was the villain of this story but the more I learned, the more he began to seem like its anti-hero, a man hustling and flailing in the face of generational change. And, like all good thrillers, the real villain wouldn\u2019t reveal himself until the final act.<\/p>\n<p>Who is Joseph Wales?<\/p>\n<p>So what was the deal with the pitch? My first hypothesis is what I\u2019ve come to think of as the \u2018Oobah Butler theory\u2019: that the AI chicken shop story was deliberately placed for the purposes of making me look silly, for journalism! I can imagine moon-faced gonzo journalist Butler, most famous for taking a made-up restaurant called The Shed (actually his parents\u2019 shed) to the top of Tripadvisor\u2019s list of the best London restaurants, struggling to stifle a grin as he explains to camera how he tricked some foolish editor into publishing his concocted story.<\/p>\n<p>But if it was a prank, the prankster was playing the long game: Wales has a modest online presence dating back years, including a portfolio and a website. His cuttings are made up of copywriting gigs covering financial advice (\u201cBest Way to Invest 20k in 2025\u201d) and pest control (\u201cWhat does a bat bite look like?\u201d). Some of his posts are, according to fairly rudimentary detection tools, at least partly written by AI. His WordPress site contains a handful of unremarkable blog posts about SEO writing: \u201cImagine you could get your search traffic to hang on your every word\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The resum\u00e9 he sent me says he is currently based in Los Angeles and studied business administration at Oxford Brookes University. A reverse image search of the headshot from his portfolio comes up with just one match: a profile on Cambly, a website that links language students with tutors. He is listed as \u201cTeacher Joseph\u201d and there is an accompanying video of a cheerful looking, bearded white man with an American accent saying he is \u201cfrom Chicago in America\u201d. Teacher Joseph apparently studied at Cairo Modern School from 2011-2014, which clashes with the dates my Joseph says he studied in Oxford.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"640\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/joseph-Wales-2.jpg\" alt=\"On the hunt for Joseph Wales \u2013 real or AI?\" class=\"wp-image-2358086\"  \/>On the hunt for Joseph Wales<\/p>\n<p>Joseph Wales\u2019 email sign-off and CV list two different American phone numbers: one is disconnected, the other just rings out. The first originates from east Michigan and the second is from 1,000 miles away in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Links to his profiles on Discord and LinkedIn are dead.<\/p>\n<p>I keep digging and find a different Joseph Wales on Facebook who works in SEO and did go to Oxford Brookes but this one says he lives in Palisade, Colorado. A reverse image search for this Joseph points to a stock image used commonly across the internet. Promisingly, this Joseph follows several freelance writing networks of the kind that occasionally repost my callouts for writers.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Next I follow up the references from his CV. These mostly consist of big international copywriting agencies, who I email with little hope of getting a response. One stands out, though: the WayneGlance Writing Agency, which does not appear to have an online footprint.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I am about to call it a day when I notice Joseph\u2019s email address: \u201cmiminiwriter\u201d. I search for \u201cmimini\u201d and not much comes up. I try various permutations of those letters and \u201cmimi ni\u201d (with a space) gives me a clue: it means \u201cI am\u201d in Swahili. \u201cI am writer\u201d. This matches another tantalising nugget from his resum\u00e9: a \u201cprofessional affiliation\u201d with the NCCK \u2013 the National Council of Churches of Kenya.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A search for \u201cWayneGlance Kenya\u201d points me towards a Kenyan jobs website featuring a CV with identical wording to the resum\u00e9 of <strong>my<\/strong> Joseph Wales. It belongs to someone based in Nairobi: I have found my man.<\/p>\n<p>The Margaux Blanchard incident<\/p>\n<p>I email my findings to Wales, not to berate him but because I\u2019m not sure who else would be interested. I\u2019ve spent so many hours trying to work out who he is that I\u2019m starting to quite like the guy. He is a grifter, sure, but he knows a good pitch, and he could tell you what to do if you discover a snake\u2019s nest on your property, which sounds like a useful life skill. He doesn\u2019t reply.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As an experiment, I feed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cityam.com\/people-and-organizations\/chatgpt\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ChatGPT<\/a> the last few issues of this magazine and ask it to come up with some features: it immediately spews out two ideas that are worryingly close to stories I\u2019ve been thinking about writing. I wonder how many pitches I\u2019ve accepted that originated in the digital mind of an LLM.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I reach out to a few fellow editors and discover that I am not alone in receiving AI-generated pitches. One desk head at a major British tabloid says \u201ca blizzard\u201d of AI pitches \u201carrive with depressing inevitability.\u201d She forwards me a press release so anodyne it couldn\u2019t possibly have been written by a human. Nobody I speak to has received anything quite as audacious as Joseph\u2019s chicken shop pitch.<\/p>\n<p>Then the journalist and broadcaster Sonya Barlow, who I\u2019d spoken to for this story, sent me an email with the words \u201cMight be of interest\u2026\u201d with a link to a story in the Press Gazette: the now infamous Margaux Blanchard scandal in which AI pitches became AI articles that were published in respected publications including Wired and Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"590\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-15.41.39.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2358098\"  \/><\/p>\n<p>This was a bombshell moment for British journalism. Dispatch Media journalist <a href=\"https:\/\/dispatch-media.com\/margaux-blanchard-the-journalist-who-didnt-exist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jacob Furedi, who broke the story<\/a>, had himself received a macabre pitch from Blanchard about a decommissioned mining town in Colorado called Gravemont that she said was being used as an underground training facility for forensics teams and first responders.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe bodies arrive by night,\u201d went the pitch. \u201cThey\u2019re rolled in on stretchers, unzipped, and placed in the mock apartments, classrooms, and bus stations.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Like my chicken shop story, it was an irresistible pitch. And like my chicken shop story, it was entirely fabricated by AI. Gravemont, Colorado doesn\u2019t even exist. But unlike Joseph Wales, Blanchard appeared to be a respectable journalist. She had written a charming story for Wired about couples getting married inside the world of Minecraft (Wired had already removed the piece after getting suspicious over the unorthodox way Blanchard had asked for payment). <\/p>\n<p>Business Insider, meanwhile, had run a pair of essays by Blanchard entitled \u201cRemote work has been the best thing for me as a parent but the worst as a person\u201d and \u201cI had my first kid at 45. I\u2019m financially stable and have years of life experience to guide me.\u201d Other publications carrying her articles include SF Gate and Index on Censorship magazine.<\/p>\n<p>I search my emails for \u201cMargaux Blanchard\u201d and get a little hit of dopamine when I find a result. A pitch from 21 June entitled London\u2019s Silent Raves Are the New Status Gyms. \u201cThis feature would look at the rise of silent dance parties doubling as fitness classes\u2014happening in parks, rooftops, even under train arches\u2014where participants wear wireless headphones and vibe out together to curated DJ-led workouts. It\u2019s sweaty, spiritual, and extremely Instagrammable. But here\u2019s the twist: I\u2019d position it as the new status symbol for the wellness-obsessed and burnout-weary.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>This is the first time I\u2019ve received a story that\u2019s just blatantly what you might call an AI hallucination.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>She offered to write 1,200 words \u201cwith that slightly cheeky City AM voice\u201d. It\u2019s a terrible pitch \u2013 I\u2019m slightly jealous she saved her best ideas for other publications \u2013 and if I ever opened the email, I immediately forgot about it. I reply telling her I love it. She never responds.<\/p>\n<p>I do some more digging. The headshot associated with Blanchard\u2019s Gmail account \u2013 margauxblanchard414 \u2013 is a lady in her fifties with a neat bob. I\u2019m almost certain it\u2019s a picture of the French-American author Mireille Guiliano, who wrote the 2004 book French Women Don\u2019t Get Fat (as far as I know she has absolutely nothing to do with this story).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is the first time I\u2019ve received a story that\u2019s just blatantly what you might call an AI hallucination,\u201d Furedi would later tell me. The thing neither of us can work out is the <strong>why<\/strong> of it all. \u201cI would love to know what\u2019s the motivation,\u201d he says. \u201cBusiness Insider don\u2019t pay very much for that sort of lifestyle op-ed slop. There must be an easier way to make money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Furedi thinks the big losers could be newer, younger freelance writers. \u201cIt\u2019s obviously irritating for editors and it\u2019s discourteous to readers, but it\u2019s a real shame for freelancers. There might be a tendency for editors to just use people they already know and trust.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m mulling over what all this means for <strong>my<\/strong> AI story when \u2013 record scratch \u2013 I get a reply from Joseph. \u201cI was just going through your emails and I can\u2019t help myself from smiling,\u201d he says. I tell him I want to talk to him and he asks why. I say I want to find out who he really is. \u201cAlright, brace yourself for the truth!\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s about time I shared this\u2026 You\u2019ll definitely have a field day\u2026 Of course, there\u2019s a story behind everyone.\u201d He signs off with a winky face.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A beautiful afternoon in Nairobi<\/p>\n<p>It is a glorious afternoon in Nairobi. The sun is dazzling blue against the green of the garden where the man I have known as Joseph Wales is sitting with three of his dogs \u2013 \u201cI have so many dogs, bro\u201d \u2013 all sturdy mongrels who occasionally jump up at him for strokes. In the background I can see squat brick houses and tropical vegetation. This is the suburb where he lives with his wife and the two young girls he has just dropped off at school. \u201cThey are very pretty,\u201d he says with pride. \u201cAnd they have my brains.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After several false starts and some fraught negotiations (I ended up wiring him \u00a320 out of my own bank account as a \u201ctoken\u201d), we connected over Google Meet. Wales, it is immediately clear, is not the jovial white bloke \u201cfrom Chicago in America\u201d but a slim black guy \u201cborn and bred\u201d in Nairobi to a Kenyan mother and a British father, who he says works for the Kenyan air force. He speaks good English with a thick, friendly accent. He\u2019s wearing a tracksuit top and a black Covid mask, which he says is to cover a fat lip he suffered during a recent car accident.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The first revelation is that his name is not Joseph Wales, it\u2019s Wilson Kaharua. \u201cI told you, I have a long story to tell!\u201d he laughs. I ask him to start at the start. He tells me he\u2019s always been interested in technology. As a boy he would read about the phishing scams that originated in Nigeria, which was years ahead of Kenya when it came to online culture, although he says he\u2019s never tried anything like that himself.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"566\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-15.39.43.png\" alt=\"Finally a picture of the real Joseph Wales \u2013 or is that Wilson Kaharua?\" class=\"wp-image-2358097\"  \/>Finally a picture of the real Joseph Wales \u2013 or is that Wilson Kaharua?<\/p>\n<p>He studied economics and finance at Kenyatta University, \u201cone of the best in my country\u201d. After graduating in 2011 \u2013 which would put him in his mid thirties \u2013 he worked as a tutor helping language students write essays and also \u201cworked at a few banks\u201d. But he says \u201cthe money they were paying me was not enough\u201d so he began applying for international copywriting assignments. Among the first was for a British company that sold industrial lighting. The owner\u2019s name was Joseph. \u201cHe taught me the ropes. He was the one who taught me who I am\u2026 before I started teaching myself. I have a lot of gratitude for him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When Joseph died of a brain tumour, Wilson took his name, reasoning that English language publications would be more comfortable with an English-sounding name. Why \u201cWales\u201d? He just liked the sound of it. The picture he uses on his website was just something he found online: \u201cIt was someone who looks almost like me,\u201d he says (in fact, it would be hard to imagine two people who look <strong>less<\/strong> alike).<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t<a class=\"read-more__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cityam.com\/9-best-london-restaurants-with-outdoor-dining-terraces-for-summer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">UK Heatwave 2.0: 8 best London restaurants with outdoor dining terraces for summer<\/a><\/p>\n<p>By 2015, Wilson was working for a number of big copywriting agencies. The pay wasn\u2019t great by British standards but it went pretty far in Nairobi. \u201cI was making good money,\u201d he says. Much of his work appeared without a byline but some \u2013 like the pest control articles \u2013 appeared under \u201cJoseph Wales\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I ask how he managed to get paid when his byline didn\u2019t match his bank account. \u201cThat\u2019s very easy,\u201d he laughs. He says some of the companies paid him in crypto but for the rest he simply bought a fake drivers\u2019 licence off the dark web and registered a Paypal account under Joseph Wales. I ask about the American phone number on his CV: he says he pays $3.99 a month for it and it reroutes to his phone in Kenya.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"478\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-26-at-15.21.11.png\" alt=\"Drone footage of Wilson's Nairobi village \u2013 AI\" class=\"wp-image-2358081\"  \/>Drone footage of Wilson\u2019s Nairobi village<\/p>\n<p>Things were going well for Wilson Kaharua. Money was rolling in and his alter-ego Joseph Wales seemed to have everyone fooled. But then, in 2023, the bottom dropped out of this carefully constructed world: \u201cAI replaced us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly there was no need to pay people like Wilson to write about bat bites and snake nests \u2013 AI can do that for free in a few seconds. So what\u2019s a guy to do? \u201cI\u2019m not liking AI but I started to study it every day,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to work with it because it\u2019s not going anywhere and we can\u2019t do anything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wilson paid to subscribe to a service that would alert him to callouts for pitches: callouts like the one I made on X asking for \u201cbig, bold, fun, weird\u201d ideas. Using DeepSeek, Wilson generated a pitch that would be perfect for this magazine. \u201cIf you were not smart enough, it would have gone through,\u201d he says pragmatically. \u201cI have to try. I\u2019m not a scammer, I\u2019m just doing what I have to to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if he ever worries about the legal implications of this set-up but he deflects. It\u2019s the magazine that would end up being sued, after all, not him. He\u2019s coy about how many publications he\u2019s sent AI pitches to but he\u2019s adamant that what he\u2019s doing isn\u2019t nefarious. He says that, had I commissioned the chicken shop article, he would have researched it online and written it as best he could. He claims to have relatives in London who could have visited the chicken shops. But the places he spoke about weren\u2019t real, I say. The story wasn\u2019t<strong> <\/strong><strong>real<\/strong>. Wilson seems unperturbed. \u201cI\u2019m not a bad person,\u201d he shrugs.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"578\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-15.35.01.png\" alt=\"Wilson capturing a picture of himself in his Nairobi village using a drone\" class=\"wp-image-2358095\"  \/>Wilson capturing a picture of himself in his Nairobi village using a drone<\/p>\n<p>This sentiment is rather undercut by a link he sends me to a story that went live the morning we spoke, which is, by his own admission, \u201cpure fiction\u201d. It\u2019s an essay called <a href=\"https:\/\/ihavethatonvinyl.com\/essays\/the-skip-that-built-a-family-how-a-broken-led-zeppelin-lp-taught-me-to-love-imperfections\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Skip That Built a Family: How a Broken Led Zeppelin LP Taught Me to Love Imperfections<\/a>, published on a website called I Have That On Vinyl. Byline: Joseph Wales. It\u2019s an elegiac story about listening with his dad to a Led Zeppelin record that jumped at a certain point in the song, and how that jump became an integral part of the music for his family, leading to a lifelong obsession with damaged vinyl.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The story has some of the tell-tale signs of AI \u2013 em dashes, bullet pointed lists, words bolded up \u2013 but it also contains some quite beautiful turns of phrase. It describes a water-damaged copy of Pet Sounds where the warp slows Wouldn\u2019t It Be Nice \u201cjust enough to make the teenage romance sound like a middle-aged memory\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It describes how his \u201cfriend\u2019s\u201d Nashville basement studio \u201csmelled of old electronics and cheap bourbon\u201d and recalls the author dropping $200 on a pristine Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab reissue. In no possible world is this the work of a man with a solid but imperfect grasp of English who lives in the outskirts of Nairobi.<\/p>\n<p>Domo arigato Mr. Roboto <\/p>\n<p>Wilson and I end our call on good terms. He shares with me some Youtube videos he made eight years ago showing drone footage of his village, set to a hiphop soundtrack, and invites me to stay with him should I ever visit Nairobi. Still, I\u2019m still not sure if anything he told me is true or if all of this has been a colossal waste of time.<\/p>\n<p>But there is one more character in this story. When I was checking Joseph Wales\u2019 references, I did get a reply, from Loud Interactive, an SEO agency in Chicago. \u201cHi, possibly a strange email but I\u2019m a journalist in the UK and a guy called Joseph Wales has listed you on his resum\u00e9 as an employer,\u201d I wrote. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s based in the US and I\u2019m pretty sure the story he pitched to me was generated by AI \u2013 I wanted to check if he was indeed employed by you as an SEO copywriter\u2026 Hope you can help!\u201d Within an hour I received a response \u2013 from the founder, no less.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Allow me to introduce you to Brent D Payne, a bull-headed gentleman who is not afraid to blow his own trumpet. His rather dizzying website is divided into subheaders that say things like \u201cBrent D Payne is an SEO visionary\u201d. There is a section dedicated to his \u201cjourney\u201d from Oregon to California to Chicago. Even back in the days of web 1.0, Brent reckons he \u201chad a vision for the future with the internet as he does now have vision of the future with AI\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"502\" width=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Screenshot-2025-08-27-at-14.31.10-1.png\" alt=\"The personal website of Brent D Payne of Loud Interactive\" class=\"wp-image-2358080\"  \/>The personal website of Brent D Payne of Loud Interactive<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed researching Brent. He likes to @ people like Elon Musk on X. His followers include Barack Obama as well as a couple of mutuals of mine. He was once mentioned in a New York Times story regarding a spat he was having with Google. He\u2019s the kind of guy who is probably quite a big deal but thinks he\u2019s a much, much bigger deal. The first line of his email to me \u2013 no \u201chello\u201d \u2013 reads: \u201cWe had over 600 stay at home moms and dads working for us then. I fired them all and replaced them with [a] homegrown AI tool I built over the past two years. Managing AIs is much easier and more predicatable [sic] than humans.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He then shared a link to a blog post from December 2024 about firing all those moms and dads, which he says was also written by AI. He signs off with: \u201cI am not surprised someone we had employed may be trying to pass something off as original when it was AI generated. Lots of slimy writers out there. Not saying he is or isn\u2019t one of them, but\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I am a bit taken aback. Most founders are cautious when talking to journalists and very, very few respond when someone in another country contacts the generic email address at the bottom of their website.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I read his blog post and it is\u2026 quite something. \u201cYesterday morning, while making \u2018roll-ups\u2019 for my family, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/results?search_query=mr+roboto+styx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mr. Roboto by Styx<\/a> came on through our HomePods,\u201d it begins. \u201cYou know that feeling when a song hits the right note emotionally and intellectually at just the right moment in life? There I was, with a crepe being served in one hand and a spatula in the other, singing \u2018Domo arigato [\u201cthanks a lot\u201d in Japanese], Mr. Roboto\u2026\u2019 when a thought struck me: how fitting this song was for what we at Loud Interactive had just accomplished.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=http:\/\/uc6f_2nPSX8\" class=\"lty-playbtn\" title=\"Play Video\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPlay Video<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Mr. Roboto, for those unversed in 1980s synth rock, is a song on Styx\u2019s eleventh studio album Kilroy Was Here. It tells the story of a cyborg \u2013 neither man nor machine \u2013 finding his place in a world of humans, exploring themes of alienation and the need for connection. I do not think it is quite as pro-robot as Brent assumes. It goes:<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">You\u2019re wondering who I am \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Machine or mannequin? \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">With parts made in Japan \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">I am the modern man \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">\u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">The problem\u2019s plain to see \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Too much technology \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Machines to save our lives \/<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">Machines dehumanize<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe decision wasn\u2019t simple,\u201d Brent continues, \u201cafter all, we replaced 600 part-time, stay-at-home parents who had been with us for over a decade. But as I think about it in light of that Styx song, it feels like a necessary progression. It\u2019s a moment where technology takes the baton from human hands\u2026 Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto echoed in my head as I worked on breakfast, handing out crepes and singing along.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s quite an image: the tech founder in his fancy kitchen singing along to existential 80s dance-rock as a small army of moms and dads start glumly updating their CVs. It is also, if I may be so bold, a horribly written blog post. Perhaps he should have kept one or two of them around.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThanks for the reply,\u201d I send back, \u201cand fair enough \u2013 this isn\u2019t an anti-AI story, more a story of how AI is changing the way people \u2013 and traditional media \u2013 works. As an editor these are questions I\u2019m currently battling with, although I don\u2019t like the idea of being entirely replaced by a consortium of LLMs! Did you ever regret casting off the 600 humans? Also is there any way of checking if Joseph Wales was among them?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Brent, clearly having a quiet afternoon, replies immediately. \u201cZero regrets. Much better outputs from our tool.\u201d He goes on to list all the things his proprietary AI can do before reassuring me that \u201cJournalism is safe. Stay at home mom and dad\u2019s [sic] that do spec writing\u2026 they\u2019re obsolete. Joseph Wales fits in that category. Joseph worked for us. He wasn\u2019t in our top 10% for output quantity or output quality. So, I never directly interfaced. But he did do a lot of spec writing for us and for a number of years. No clue if it was any good.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So Joseph \u2013 or, more accurately, Wilson \u2013 did work for Brent. His resum\u00e9 isn\u2019t entirely fabricated. I\u2019m inclined to believe he\u2019s telling the truth about most of the other stuff he told me, too, although there\u2019s no way to be sure.<\/p>\n<p>A fatberg of hallucinated slop<\/p>\n<p>As an editor, I clearly can\u2019t condone using AI to generate made-up pitches, especially if you plan on sending them to me. The last thing we need is more people adding to the growing fatberg of hallucinated slop that, day-by-day, makes up a larger and larger proportion of the internet (some reports suggest up to 90 per cent of new online content could be AI-generated by 2026, although this statistic could itself be AI-generated for all I know).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But I do enjoy the irony that people put out of work by AI are turning to those same tools to re-enter the market through the back door, threatening to form a surreal feedback loop of garbled content, fragments of real life jumbled up and reassembled, a limitless supply of cut-and-shut cars rolling off the forecourt of an infinite number of dodgy garages.<\/p>\n<p>The simple fact is, AI exists. It will change the face of almost every industry, upend and uproot us all, shake the system by its ankles with little regard for what might fall out of its pockets. And, as is the way of things, it will start at the bottom and work its way up. I don\u2019t even think what Brent did is wrong, necessarily, although I could do without the triumphant tone and all the \u2018Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto\u2019 nonsense.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In light of all this, I can see why someone like Wilson might decide to finally take a leaf out of the book of those Nigerians he read about all those years ago. He\u2019s smart, resourceful, charismatic and in danger of being utterly left behind, his livelihood swept away by a tsunami within which he couldn\u2019t possibly stay afloat. There but for the grace of God go I, and you, and all of us.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t<a class=\"read-more__link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cityam.com\/seraphine-princess-of-wales-favourite-owed-a-kings-ransom\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Seraphine: Princess of Wales\u2019 favourite owed a king\u2019s ransom<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\t\tSimilarly tagged content: <\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tSections\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tCategories\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tPeople &amp; Organisations\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wednesday 27 August 2025 3:56 pm \u00a0|\u00a0\u00a0Updated:\u00a0 Wednesday 27 August 2025 5:06 pm Share Facebook Share on Facebook&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,51,1315,2766,6772,388,2452,12,326,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-378032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-chatgpt","12":"tag-culture","13":"tag-deepmind","14":"tag-lifestyle","15":"tag-media","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-tech","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115101613924295036","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}