Ever stumble across an online “news article” that just doesn’t feel quite right? You may be onto something.
A joint investigation by The Florida Trib and the KCRW podcast Question Everything found that a so-called “independent, locally owned digital news publication” dubbed the South Florida Standard was in reality an AI-generated Potemkin village staffed entirely by fake writers.
The writers had AI-generated profile pictures and made-up biographies to match their beats — a practice that’s become a hallmark sign of AI-fabricated “journalists” — and churned out an extraordinary amount of content, much of which turned out to be plagiarized from other outlets.
After the Trib revealed that all of the alleged journalists staffing the site were fake, the whole operation shut down.
“Clearly, whoever’s behind this does not care about the truth,” The Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride told the Trib, adding that the “only way to address it is to try and find somebody who actually controls the keys to this website.”
That’s exactly what the Trib did. With the help of University of South Florida journalism professor Casey Frechette, the real reporters traced the South Florida Standard to more news sites in South Carolina and California — titled the Charleston Sentinel and the San Francisco Download, respectively — and, finally, connected them all to a Philadelphia-based guy named Drew Chapin, who runs an image management firm called The Discoverability Company.
On the Discoverability Company’s website, Chapin describes himself as a “digital fixer for people and businesses who need the internet to tell a better story about them.”
At first, reached with a list of questions, an unnamed administrator for the South Florida Standard dismissed any connection between the site and Chapin, telling reporters that the faux local news publisher was being developed “with the intent of building search engine authority and selling to a domain investor who may use it to develop a news property or newsletter or similar digital property.” In other words: according to this unnamed entity, they were juicing up a locally-targeted web domain with AI content in order to later flip it.
But after some dogged reporting by the investigative team, Chapin finally admitted to journalists that he was indeed the owner of the South Florida Standard — and 17 similar AI-powered properties in total. According to him, all it took was a $10 domain name and some limited AI tooling, and he could spit out a fake news site in under 20 minutes. Bleak.
Pink slime sites are nothing new, but as Chapin sadly demonstrated, they’re easier and cheaper than ever for people who don’t care about facts — or are actively trying to manipulate them — to whip up. Next time you click on a local news piece, make sure you’re getting it from someone like the journalists at the Trib — and not from the fabricated non-entities like the South Florida Standard.
Do you know of a site using AI to generate fake news? Send us a tip: [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous.
More on AI and journalism: New York Times Issues Stern Warning to Its Freelance Writers About AI Use
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