An interview request from a bot posing as a reporter revealed an AI-generated news site with articles attacking AI industry critics. For the
... For the second time this month, we found links to Targeted Victory. Last week, Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel of the advocacy group Encode, forwarded me a screenshot of an email he had received (see image below). The sender, a reporter named Michael Chen, was seeking comment for a story about an AI bill in Tennessee for a publication called The Wire by Acutus. Something was off about the email. The full title of the article was shared in advance, the framing was highly loaded, and the only format offered was “written Q&A.” Web and social media searches turned up no one by the name “Michael Chen” publicly associated with Acutus. Chen was also writing from a generic address ([email protected]), which would be an odd convention for a reporter at a publication that touts many contributors and has a near-daily publication rate. When I ran the message through Pangram, an AI content detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate, the email came back as “fully AI-generated.” Michael Chen, it turns out, almost certainly isn’t a real reporter. And Acutus, it turns out, almost certainly doesn’t have any real reporters at all.
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