A spate of articles by a freelance journalist named Margaux Blanchard appeared in major English-language publications in 2025. But the pieces, including first-person essays for Business Insider and a WIRED feature on couples getting married in the Minecraft game, were not what they appeared to be. Margaux Blanchard didn’t exist, demonstrating how AI is dramatically reshaping the freelance journalism landscape.

After an editor grew suspicious of a strange-sounding pitch and challenged Blanchard, it became clear that the work published under that name was most likely AI-generated. One by one, the outlets which had published the pieces took them down.

A few months after the ‘Margaux Blanchard’ story, another would-be freelance journalist was caught using AI to generate pitches and pieces, which again were published in major news outlets, showing AI's dramatic reshaping of the freelance journalism landscape. This time, the articles were under the name ‘Victoria Goldiee’.

These cases are the most extreme scenarios. However, they still pose serious questions about the way the freelancing system has worked until now. Calls for pitches rely on trust: that the journalist is who they say they are, that they’re doing the work themselves.

How are commissioning editors navigating an environment where anybody can generate an AI alter ego and produce articles at the push of a prompt? On the other hand, how is the ease with which text and images can be created affecting freelancers themselves?

With these questions in mind, I put out an open call to our audience in the hope of hearing from freelancers and commissioning editors on how their day-to-day is changing because of GenAI.

A total of 45 freelance journalists and commissioning editors responded.

The responses surprised me, with many more freelancers than I expected writing in to say that GenAI has helped make them more organised and efficient. There were still some sceptics. But the overall picture was one of an industry slowly adopting GenAI, albeit with caution and caveats.

Read the full article about how AI is transforming freelance journalism by Marina Adami at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.