What Do You Do When A Scam Journalist Pitches An AI-Generated Story About Tulsa?

Shortly before we left work for last week’s Thanksgiving holiday, I was scrolling Bluesky when an article caught my eye. An online features magazine in Toronto, not so different from our own, published a fascinating investigation into a freelancer who’d pitched them a story. 

The writer, it turned out, was a modern fabulist, who appeared to be using AI generation tools to produce stories for publications that took the shape and form of meaty features without their meaning or heft. Nicholas Hune-Brown at Toronto-based The Local investigated this alleged scammer, Victoria Goldiee, who had demonstrated a propensity for fooling major publications. Architectural Digest, Dwell, The Cut, The Guardian and others had all published — and later retracted — her work, which, as Hune-Brown shows, consistently contained fabrications. 

I found this all intriguing because we at The Pickup solicit, accept and decline pitches from journalists all the time: it’s central to our model of doing business. And as I got further along into Hune-Brown’s story, I had a mildly shocking realization: Victoria Goldiee had pitched us as well. 

Alicia, Zack and I meet once a week to discuss stories and Goldiee’s pitch had come up. It was about the evolution of the Tulsa Sound, and we dismissed it because we thought it bore too many of the hallmarks of artificially generated copy: it was vague, overwrought, overly flattering to our pitch guidelines and even contained a fabrication that we assumed to be a hallucination characteristic of chatbots built on large language models. 

Here’s the text of Goldiee’s pitch in its entirety, which we received on November 13, about a week before Hune-Brown’s story went up: 

Hi Alicia — would you be interested in a pitch that brings niche Tulsa lore out of the vault through the evolution of the Tulsa Sound? I’d like to make it timely by exploring how a rising wave of young Tulsa musicians are blending red dirt, bedroom pop, indie folk, and lo-fi production styles to reinvent what “Tulsa Sound” means to their generation. This piece would move between history, cultural memory, and present-day innovation, showing readers how a sound born in smoky studios and late-night jam circles is being reinterpreted through laptops, home rigs, and community-driven micro-venues.

I’ll open the story by grounding readers in the roots of the Tulsa Sound, tracing its lineage back to artists like J.J. Cale, Leon Russell, Elvin Bishop, Jesse Ed Davis, and the uniquely relaxed, groove-forward style that blended blues, country, and rock in a way that felt distinctly, almost inexplicably, Tulsa. I’ll explore how iconic places like The Church Studio, The Colony, and Cain’s Ballroom shaped this identity, and how the city itself—its heat, its pace, its contradictions—gave the sound its laid-back pulse. I want to tap into the city’s musical memory by bringing forward some lesser-known lore too: the stories musicians tell about late-night sessions that spilled into sunrise, bootleg tapes that circulated far beyond Oklahoma, and the way these early innovators influenced artists across genres without ever chasing the spotlight.

From there, I’ll shift into why this matters now. Tulsa’s emerging music community is undergoing a quiet but notable transformation, driven by younger artists who feel connected to the Tulsa Sound more as a cultural inheritance than a strict genre. Musicians like Casii Stephan, Branjae, Ken Pomeroy, and John Moreland each pull elements from Oklahoma’s musical DNA in ways that feel modern, emotional, and genre-fluid. Meanwhile, rising indie and bedroom pop artists across Tulsa—playing shows at places like Whittier Bar, LowDown, and Mercury Lounge—are reinterpreting that signature groove as something softer, dreamier, or more experimental. Some of these musicians cite J.J. Cale or Leon Russell as spiritual influences rather than direct sonic templates, which creates room for an entirely new conversation about what “Tulsa Sound” even means in 2025.

I’ll incorporate reporting from historians, artists, and archivists shaping the contemporary narrative. I plan to speak with John Wooley, one of the leading historians on Oklahoma music and co-author of books on the Tulsa Sound; Teresa Knox, owner of The Church Studio and a key figure in preserving its history; and David Teegarden, a Grammy-winning drummer who recorded with Cale and maintains firsthand knowledge of the era. On the contemporary side, I’ll talk to younger artists like Branjae, Ken Pomeroy, and local producers such as Mark Kuykendall or the team behind Brighter Light Studios, who are helping shape the next wave of Tulsa’s independent sound. I’ll also reach out to venue owners and bookers who can speak to changing tastes and the rise of hybrid shows where indie, folk, and pop acts share space with Americana or red dirt performers, showing a cultural shift unfolding on stage week after week.

Throughout the piece, I’ll build a narrative that shows how the Tulsa Sound has always been defined less by rigid musical structure and more by attitude—an understated coolness, a willingness to experiment, and a refusal to rush the groove. That ethos translates powerfully to younger generations raised online, recording alone in bedrooms, or building collaborative communities in small venues that function as modern analogs to the intimate spaces where the original Tulsa Sound was born. The story will highlight how Tulsa’s musical identity is expanding without losing its roots, and how this evolution reflects broader cultural shifts happening across the city: young creatives revisiting their heritage, repurposing it, and using local history as raw material for something new.

Setting aside obvious questions like “Why would a writer for The Cut and Architectural Digest pitch a niche online outlet in Tulsa?” and “When is she going to find the time to interview all these music people?” I could see how an editor at a journalistic publication — more strapped for resources in 2025 than ever before — could take a chance on a scammer like Goldiee. The story she pitched wasn’t terribly interesting and didn’t seem to respond to an actual conversation anybody’s having in Tulsa right now, but she’d at least demonstrated an ability to fill space.¹ 

Re-reading it, there’s a sentence midway through the fourth graf that I find especially spooky, the one that names three real music industry people in Tulsa — Mark Kuykendall, Branjae and Ken Pomeroy — alongside Brighter Lights Studios, a thing I’d never heard of, and that has no online footprint. I texted half a dozen other people who would know — songwriters, music journalists, sound engineers and working musicians — and none of them had heard of it either. Even the mention of this fictitious studio made us all feel like we were going a little crazy. 

This seems like the future we’re barreling toward, whether we like it or not. Major publishers from Business Insider to Wired have been dinged for letting AI-generated copy through to audiences ever since ChatGPT hit the market.² And you can’t use one of the big four tech companies’ software these days without tripping over a new AI assist-type tool. 

Hune-Brown raised a lot of compelling questions in a follow-up that I’ve been mulling over myself, especially the question of what can be done to protect readers from outright fabrications and scams. 

I think exercising good judgment and common sense is more than half the battle here. Reading through the pitch when we first received it, the Brighter Lights Studios thing made us suspicious, so we Googled Victoria Goldiee and noticed that one of her stories led to a 404 error. She seemed fishy, so we disengaged. Crisis averted. 

But it’s on the user end of things that I get more concerned about AI creep. A lot of people seem to like AI-generated content, or at the bare minimum, not mind it too much. I think of it like kudzu: an invasive species that grows quickly and kills the native plant population by covering it up.³ 

But I’ll admit that the line gets blurry quickly. What if a real writer with a working knowledge of Tulsa’s cultural amenities and history used ChatGPT — not to do the research — but to workshop a pitch they sent us? I suspect this has probably already happened. And if it did, it’s not like we have a way of knowing for certain. 

When we work on stories here at The Pickup, two of the questions we ask ourselves fairly often are “Why should we publish this now?” and “What’s the ‘therefore’ here?” These keep us focused on the big picture, and prevent the waste of readers’ time and attention. I don’t think you can say the same for the empty content generated by AI. It’s simply a means to an end. There’s no humanity in it. 

At the end of the day, I suppose the biggest question of all here is whether or not it matters to readers if a real human being saw fit to consider whether they should write a story in the first place, how to go about doing so and what to do with the new, unexpected or complicating information they gathered along the way. If that doesn’t matter to audiences, then I suppose we’ll have to close up shop. These considerations carry moral and ethical responsibility; they’re for humans, not for chatbots. 

The Pickup is an independent media company doing culture journalism for curious Oklahomans. We write stories for real people, not AI scrapers or search engines. Become a paying subscriber today to read all of our articles, get bonus newsletters and more.