"Editors are facing an influx of AI-written pitches, including at science publications like mine. What now?"
"“Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information.” So went the headline atop an article publishediew in Science magazine in June, with the byline Caroline Williams. The piece was removed three months later, after editors discovered that the author was an impostor—not Caroline Williams, the established freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom, but someone who had adopted Williams’s name and clips.
John Travis, the managing news editor for Science, told me that his team, and the sources interviewed for the piece, had only communicated by email with Fake Caroline—a person (or persons) who relied heavily on AI to write, based on post-publication analysis of the pitch and first draft by Pangram. “We were conned,” Travis said.
Still, the published piece was an accurate story. “It really sent me on a bit of a spin,” the real Caroline Williams told me over Zoom, of the whole affair, “because I was like, well, how many editors out there have me on their mental list of ‘do not touch’? I have no idea.”"
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Tom Zeller Jr. reports for Columbia Journalism Review October 8, 2026.
