To City News

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.

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.”

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.