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.