“The bodies arrive at night” – how the media fell for the Relotius stories of an artificially generated journalist

The problems Margaux Blanchard describes in the April 14 issue of Business Insider magazine are familiar to many parents and employees: workdays filled with stressful trips to daycare, hastily packed lunches, or the guilty conscience when you're too tired to read a bedtime story in the evening.

At first, Blanchard writes, she found working from home liberating. Finally, time for the kids! But then, the disillusionment: Blanchard found herself playing Lego with her child during a Zoom meeting. She reads emails in bed in the morning, and the boundaries between work and personal life blur. "I was physically there, but mentally somewhere else."

Business Insider, which is majority-owned by Axel Springer Verlag, recently took the article down. Margaux Blanchard is not a human being, but a pseudo-journalist created using artificial intelligence. There's a photo of her as the author and a Twitter profile where she calls herself a "freelance journalist and mother." Her stories sounded so true to life and good that several media outlets fell for them.

In May of this year, the Condé Nast-owned platform "Wired" published a story by Margaux Blanchard about couples getting married in digital parallel worlds like "Minecraft." For example, Sarah Nguyen from Portland (USA) and Jamie Patel from Leicester (England) met while playing "Minecraft" at the age of thirteen. "We didn't just play together," Jamie is quoted as saying, "we created a world, told stories, and lived in the universe we created."

The wedding, he proudly emphasizes, cost only $300, much less than at a venue. They didn't even need seating. The parents were still happy.

This article has also been removed from the internet, but, like the one from Business Insider, can be read in the archives. The matter is particularly embarrassing for Wired, which once honored Barack Obama with a guest article. It's a tech magazine that has long focused on artificial intelligence.

As the editorial team writes in an apology, they like to denounce the dangers these pose to the media. They also pride themselves on having "a team of brilliant fact-checkers in our editorial office." However, in the case of virtual weddings, they failed or weren't consulted at all. Sarah Nguyen from Portland and Jamie Patel from Leicester are just as absent as Margaux Blanchard.

The affair was uncovered thanks to journalist Jacob Furedi, who launched the online magazine "Dispatch" in early April. He claims to have received an email from Margaux Blanchard in which the AI-generated journalist offered a story about the abandoned mining town of Gravemont in Colorado. There, Blanchard said, scientists and rescue workers were trained for forensic work or war crimes investigations by examining the bodies of real dead people placed in replica apartments, hospitals, or bus stations.

According to Furedi, the article began: "The bodies arrive at night." However, the story sounded too good for Furedi, and he began to investigate. His exposure of the fake journalist Margaux Blanchard caused quite a stir in the Anglo-Saxon media, including reports from the Guardian and the New York Post. A few days ago, a certain Andrew Frelon admitted on the Medium platform that he had created Blanchard. He claimed to have been commissioned by a "major media client" to demonstrate how easily a fully autonomous AI system could produce articles that "top-notch media outlets" would buy.

"Margaux was able to imitate the tone, style, and voice of a seasoned journalist," Frelon writes. The difference between human and machine contributions will soon be indistinguishable. Andrew Frelon is also an AI-generated fictional character, said to be a cybersecurity expert. Frelon also claims to be the "manager" of the band "The Velvet Sundown," a virtual fake group that has produced several hits with a retro 1960s sound.

Jacob Furedi, who exposed the Margaux Blanchard hoax, sees the case as a warning against media tendencies to replace storytelling with cheap, quickly produced "content." But, he adds, while artificial intelligence may be capable of writing second-rate commentary or garbled news, it can't hike in Yosemite Park, camp with British preppers, or discuss sex with Irvine Welsh.

Only real journalism, like the one his new magazine practices, can do that. Despite all his self-promotion, however, Furedi fails to mention that con artists and fraudsters existed even before the AI ​​era. While Tom Kummer, Stephen Glass, and Claas Relotius are real, many of their stories are just as false as the Colorado corpse story. They have enjoyed striking success with magazines that consider themselves the pinnacle of journalism.

The award-winning Claas Relotius invented characters and scenes for Der Spiegel and other media outlets that were meant to confirm political worldviews, such as stupid Trump voters hunting down migrants. They existed only in his head. But like Margaux Blanchard, he imitated a certain type of journalist so well that people believed everything he said.