Business
Business Insider Deletes Dozens of Articles After AI Scam Probe
A leading news website has removed dozens of articles after apparently being conned by bogus “journalists”—who may have been assisted in their deception by AI.
Business Insider quietly deleted at least 34 articles written under 13 different bylines after admitting it had published two articles written by a phony “journalist” who used the fake name “Margaux Blanchard.”
Now it has deleted dozens more written by “Tim Stevensen,” “Nate Giovanni,” “Nathan Giovanni,” “Amarilis J. Yera,” “Onyeka Nwelue,” “Alice Amayu,” “Mia Brown,” “Tracy Miller,” “Margaret Awano,” “Erica Mayor,” “Kalmar Theodore,” “Lauren Bennett,” “Louisa Eunice,” and “Alyssa Scott.” All were replaced with a single-sentence note saying they “didn’t meet Business Insider’s standards.”
A review by the Daily Beast has found the articles which Business Insider deleted were all “personal essays,” for which the outlet pays between $200 and $300. The first was published in April 2024 and the most recent in August, days before “Margaux Blanchard’s” scam came to light.
Among the topics the apparently bogus “essayists” covered were “I’m 38 and live in a retirement village”; “Costco Next is the chain’s best-kept secret that’s free for members. I’ve already saved thousands of dollars using it.”; “I had a meltdown in front of my 5 kids.”; and—possibly ironically—“I was accepted into a well-regarded graduate program. I turned down the offer because AI is destroying my desired industry.”
The Beast’s review found several red flags within the since-deleted essays that suggest the writing did not reflect the authors’ lived experiences. This included contradictory information in separate essays by the same author, such as changing the gender and ages of their supposed children, and author-contributed photos that reverse-image searches confirm were pulled from elsewhere online.
The author “Tim Stevensen” claimed in one piece to have two daughters and a son, but four months later, he had “sons.” “Stevensen” was possibly the most prolific and contradictory of the “essayists.” In seven articles he detailed how he had met his wife eight years ago; that he and his wife had children in their twenties; that he had worked 20-hour shifts for years; that he had been a high-school teacher for a decade before recently quitting to be a freelance writer; that he had “unpaid bills”; and that he and his wife wagered $5,000 for a weight-loss challenge.
Another article by “Stevensen” included a photo that he had supplied, which claimed to show him and his daughters. A reverse-image search revealed that the photo was of a man named Stowe Gregory, who wrote a personal essay months earlier for the i newspaper in the U.K. about his love for his step-daughters. The only Tim Stevensen listed in the U.S. did not respond to the Daily Beast, but is not a former high-school teacher.
An internal note to staff from the site’s editor-in-chief, Jamie Heller, stated that the questionable essays were removed “due to concerns about the authors’ identity or veracity.” Heller’s note, first obtained by Semafor, said no articles written by its staff had been affected by Tuesday’s purge. The internal communication added that the site’s verification protocols have since been “bolstered.” A spokesperson for Business Insider declined to comment further, but a company source said the site publishes around 70,000 articles a year, making the deleted articles a tiny proportion of its output.
Heller became editor-in-chief of the site—owned by German media company Axel Springer, which also owns Politico—in September 2024, when the apparent cons were already underway, although the majority were published after her appointment.
It is unclear whether or to what extent the deleted articles had used AI to generate their content. The Daily Beast used AI detection software and found that the nixed essays did not register as being written word-for-word by AI.
However, the articles are littered with unlikely facts and odd phrases, which could point to the use of generative AI. One “writer” claimed she lived in Houston, Texas, and that it took an hour without a car to get to “nearby cities,” another described retirement as “glory days,” and one wrote about “apple pie” and “diners” being part of Australian life. One claimed to have been a teacher who was “summoned” to speak to the principal and told he had been “chosen to represent the school in Canada, which meant I would be away from my family for six to 12 months.”
The Daily Beast was unable to reach any of the supposed authors—some of whom have been published elsewhere, including one who claims to live in both the United Kingdom and Appalachia—for comment, leaving the motive for an apparent con a mystery. At least three of the bylines also appear on articles in writersweekly.com, offering tips on how to become a freelance writer.
Author “Nate Giovanni,” also credited “Nathan Giovanni,” had at least five deleted essays. In a December essay about convincing his wife to have a third child in their 40s, “Giovanni” wrote that he had two daughters, Leila and Sophia, and a two-year-old son named Mason. In an essay published in March, he had two sons, and his wife was at home with a newborn. In May, he wrote that he and his wife had been traveling the world as house sitters for the last two years, including a two-week stay at a “Rustic Villa in Tuscany” and trips to destinations like Charleston, Oregon, New Mexico, New York, Australia, Canada, and Merida, Mexico. His grasp of geography seemed odd.
“Some memorable countries we’ve visited include London, for a quick three-day experience with a house cat. We made it to the London Bridge,” one article states. By July, “Giovanni” was no longer a world traveler: He had quit being a high school English teacher and was in the aftermath of losing his job at a failed startup.
“Amarilis J. Yera” wrote last month about buying a home about an hour outside of Houston six years earlier, when she was 24. However, a submitted photo of the home’s exterior was that of a new-build property that was sold this summer in Dallas, over a month before “Yera’s” essay was published. The essay included photos that were supposedly of the home’s interior, but a reverse image search showed that identical photos were posted months earlier in a Kenya-based Facebook group.
The essay included a selfie submitted by the author. An editor with an almost identical name, Amaralis Yera, lives in Puerto Rico. She could not be reached for comment, but her professional headshot on LinkedIn shows that they are not the same person. Records show there is no other “Amaralis Yera” living in the United States.
Another author was listed as “Onyeka Nwelue,” the same name as a Nigerian-born author who went viral in 2023 for falsely claiming he was a professor at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in England. The bogus professor himself then claimed that other scammers have used his identity and photos.
In her note to staff, Heller said the internal probe was launched after trade newspaper Press Gazette revealed that two Business Insider essays published in April—written by a “Margaux Blanchard”—were “likely” filled with made-up anecdotes that were AI-generated and that “Blanchard” was fake. The emergence of generative AI appears to have led to a spike in articles being published under bogus names.
Five other outlets, including WIRED, were duped by “Margaux Blanchard,” Press Gazette reported. Their true identity remains unknown.
Business
CEO of Amazon-Backed AI Company Predicts “End of Human Creativity” in a Dystopian Future to Rival Any Movie
The death of human creativity is coming, and it is coming from the ever-present threat of AI. At least, that seems to be the opinion of the CEO of Amazon-backed AI company Fable, who are behind the restoration of missing footage from the 1942 Orson Welles movie, The Magnificent Ambersons.
Edward Saatchi made an appearance on Squawk Box on CNBC last week, an interview that helped promote his company’s involvement in completing an 80-year-old movie that has been missing a large section of its story for many years. While this is a wonderful thing, and in many ways simply the next stage in the evolution of movie restoration, Saatchi seems happy to believe that AI will go well beyond just helping to revive lost and damaged movies of the past and will instead become as much of a creative force as humans. He said:
“What’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs. So, we wanted to train our AI on the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years, Orson Welles.”
Saatchi went on to envision a world where “a movie would come out on a Friday, with [an AI model] alongside it, day-and-date.” This, he enthused, would allow fans to generate additional content based on the movie, and by the end of opening weekend “there are millions of new scenes.” Yes, because that sounds like exactly what the world needs.
According to the CEO, who is not exactly likely to dumb down the purpose of his company, the idea of making “enormous amounts of money” from AI is something that studios and stakeholders are “starting to come around to” after rejecting it as little as a year ago. In his excitement for all of this money-making, potentially at the expense of actual human interaction with the creative process, Saatchi declared that the whole belief in computers being capable of generating original work would be “something Warhol would have found very exciting, DaVinci. The idea that AI can be creative and that you can create a work of art that creates more works of art is really exciting.”
AI Is Back at the Hearts of Several Lawsuits
Although Fable CEO Edward Saatchi is ready to revolutionize the world with AI, seemingly whatever the cost, the idea of anyone being able to create additional scenes for a movie is filled with so many potential pitfalls that it is impossible to comprehend the issues that could come about with such a thing becoming reality. Currently, AI is already caught up in several lawsuits linked to copyright infringement.
Anthropic AI, a company that specializes in generative AI, recently agreed to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit with a group of authors to the tune of $1.5 billion. In the last few days, Warner Bros. has joined Disney and Universal in filing a case against Midjourney, claiming the company has recently eliminated “guardrails” that previously prevented the platform from generating videos and images that use trademarked and copyrighted characters including Superman, Tom & Jerry, and several Looney Tunes characters. Today, Apple has found itself caught in the same web, with the tech giant being accused of using pirated versions of copyrighted novels and books to train its LLM, OpenELM.
Despite all these lawsuits, along with the scrutiny on AI content use in Hollywood from unions, it seems that those heading up AI companies only have their eyes on one thing, and it isn’t how their technology will impact the people currently making a living in the creative side of filmmaking and writing. For regular people, sitting in their bedrooms with no money and without the talent to render their ideas themselves, AI can hand them the world, but for studios, it can only hand them a way of cutting costs and increasing profits.
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have made their way into corporate environments as employees report using tools for work without formal approval from IT departments.
IBM says the growing reliance on personal AI tools in the workplace introduces serious risks to Canadian businesses, from potential data leaks and compliance issues to losing control of sensitive business information. Shadow AI, the use of software without oversight, costs nearly $308,000 per data breach, according to the company.
“It’s only growing until we actually are able to lock down the use of shadow AI, enable our employees and enable our organizations, but through sanctioned, governed, secured AI,” Daina Proctor, Canadian security services leader for IBM Canada, told BNNBloomberg.ca in a Friday interview.
A shadow AI survey from IBM found that while 79 per cent of full-time office workers said they use AI at work, 25 per cent rely on enterprise grade AI tools. The rest rely on a mix of personal and employer tools (33 per cent) or entirely on personal apps (21 per cent).
IBM said while AI tools offer organizations the opportunity to significantly improve productivity, the technology presents new challenges such as security threats. Despite the risk, the survey found AI adoption in the workplace is being led by employees.
“AI adoption in the workplace is no longer theoretical, it’s happening, and it’s being led by employees,” said Deb Pimentel, president of IBM Canada, in a news release. “To securely and efficiently harness the value of AI for smarter business operations, leaders should prioritize secure solutions, align AI with tangible business objectives, and foster a data-driven culture.”
Canadian workers overwhelmingly reported viewing AI as a tool that makes them better at their jobs as 97 per cent said they agree AI improves their productivity at work, 86 per cent felt confident using AI, and nearly 80 per cent said AI allows them to spend more time on the strategic or creative aspects of their roles.
“As humans, we’re going to find things to help ourselves to evolve ourselves to get more efficient, to get more creative to get more productive,” said Proctor. “As the saying goes, ‘water will flow downhill.’”
Surveyors found Canadian workers believe AI allows them to save time. More than half (55 per cent) said AI saves them between one and three hours per weeks and 26 per cent reported saving up to six hours. About 61 per cent of employees surveyed said AI allows them to complete a task faster, 43 per cent said AI enables more efficient workload management, 40 per cent said AI allows improved accuracy and 39 per cent said AI enables increased creativity.
While employees report using AI, highlighting benefits, only a small handful of surveyed employees (29 per cent) believe their employer is using AI to its full potential. Nearly half of workers (46 per cent) said they would leave their current job for one that uses AI more effectively.
Proctor said she wants companies to invest in AI so that employees don’t have to use personal devices.
“Organizations need to provide secured enterprise grade AI tools, or else we as individuals, we as employees, are going to find the AI tools that maybe our organizations don’t really want us to, so we need to close that gap,” said Proctor.
She said businesses are openly leaning into AI in a proactive, collaborative approach tailoring programs to ensure that their confidentiality, regulatory and conduct requirements are met to bridge the gap of what they need and what employees expect.
Methodology
The research was conducted by Censuswide, among a sample of 4,000 full-time office workers who are not sole proprietors and are familiar with AI tools in the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. The data was collected between May 23 to May 30, 2025.
A programme providing school holiday clubs for thousands of children in Cornwall has been extended.
The Time2Move holiday programme supports families with activities and healthy food for children aged between five and 16, and is fully funded for those eligible for benefits-related free school meals, the government has confirmed.
The government announced a three-year extension for the scheme, as part of a £600m investment nationally.
The programme is run by Active Cornwall, which brings together providers across the county, and said £8m had been invested in it since 2021.
Tim Marrion, partnership manager at Active Cornwall said: “We know that school holidays can bring particular challenges for families on lower incomes and children can face triple inequalities of social isolation, poor diet and low levels of physical activity over the holiday periods.
“Through our Time2Move programme we make a real difference for over 12,000 children and their families each year, so this funding extension is very welcome news”.
The programme is fully-funded by the Department for Education and is known nationally as the Holiday Activities and Food Programme.
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