Wow. It doesn't sound like this person wasted your time, @nickhunebrown.bsky.social. It made for a really great story and a fascinating read. It reminds me of people offering services to write assignments for students willing to pay, except this is now reaching an entirely different level of fraud.
A few months ago @thelocal.to got a promising pitch from a writer with bylines in whole bunch of reputable publications—The Cut, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, etc. Then I started investigating. Here's a story about fabulists in journalism's AI slop era. thelocal.to/investigatin...
Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local
A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.