As 2025 draws to a close, one of the year's most unsettling media tales involves a fabricated story about fried chicken espionage, a phantom journalist, and the creeping reality of AI's threat to truth in journalism. City AM's Life & Style Editor, Steve Dinneen, recounts his award-nominated investigation that started with a single, too-good-to-be-true pitch and spiralled into a global story about identity, automation, and survival.
The Pitch That Was Pure Fiction
The story began with an electrifying email from a writer named Joseph Wales. His pitch, "London's Fried Chicken Wars: Espionage, Betrayal and Social Media Sabotage," promised a six-week undercover investigation. It detailed corporate spies photographing keypads, troll armies flaming social media, and fake mystery shoppers planting dead flies. He offered evidence from FOI requests, WhatsApp screenshots, and police reports, even claiming a manager handed him a napkin scrawled with a warning: "Be careful who you eat with."
It was a gripping, cinematic pitch. The only problem? It was completely fabricated by artificial intelligence. The alarm bells rang quickly: a sinister message on a napkin? A Chicken Cottage in Stratford that doesn't exist? The prose itself betrayed its origin with numbered headers, bolded keywords, and liberal em-dashes. Confronted, Wales admitted to using AI for the pitch but claimed he'd never use it for actual stories. Then, he went silent.
The Global Hunt for Joseph Wales
Instead of deleting the email, Dinneen began to dig. The digital trail of Joseph Wales was a maze of contradictions. His portfolio showed copywriting on financial advice and pest control. His headshot, a cheerful bearded American, linked to a Cambly tutor profile claiming a Chicago origin. His CV said he studied at Oxford Brookes and was based in Los Angeles.
Reverse image searches revealed stock photos. Phone numbers were disconnected. The breakthrough came from his email address: "miminiwriter." "Mimi ni" means "I am" in Swahili. This clue, alongside a listed affiliation with Kenya's National Council of Churches, led to a Kenyan jobs website. There, a CV with identical wording belonged to Wilson Kaharua, based in Nairobi.
Nairobi, AI, and the Fight for a Livelihood
After fraught negotiations, Dinneen met Wilson Kaharua over Google Meet on a sunny Nairobi afternoon. The real person behind Joseph Wales was a slim, charismatic Kenyan in his mid-thirties, not the American in the stock photo. He explained his story: after studying economics, he turned to international copywriting. When a beloved British mentor named Joseph died, Wilson adopted his name, adding "Wales" because he liked the sound. He used a fake ID for PayPal and a cheap US VoIP number.
For years, he made a good living writing SEO content. Then, in 2023, AI replaced him and hundreds like him. "The bottom dropped out," he said. Faced with obsolescence, he began studying AI tools like DeepSeek, using them to generate compelling pitches for publications like City AM. "I'm not a scammer," he insisted pragmatically. "I'm just doing what I have to to survive." He claimed that if commissioned, he would have researched and written the chicken shop story himself, using relatives in London.
The Bigger Picture: A "Fatberg of Hallucinated Slop"
Wilson's story was not an isolated case. Dinneen discovered editors across British tabloids were receiving "a blizzard" of AI pitches. This connected to the Margaux Blanchard scandal, where AI-generated articles were published in major outlets like Wired and Business Insider. Blanchard's pitches, including one for City AM about "London's Silent Raves," were vivid hallucinations. Her profile photo was stolen from an author unrelated to the story.
The investigation led back to one of Wilson's former employers: Brent D. Payne of Loud Interactive in Chicago. In a startlingly candid email, Payne boasted of firing 600 stay-at-home parent writers and replacing them with a proprietary AI tool. "Zero regrets. Much better outputs from our tool," he wrote, confirming Wilson had been a low-output spec writer for him. Payne celebrated this shift in a blog post, ironically set to Styx's 'Mr. Roboto,' a song critiquing dehumanising technology.
Conclusion: A Surreal Feedback Loop
This saga reveals a disturbing feedback loop: workers displaced by AI are using the same tools to fight their way back into a shrinking market, often blurring the lines between creativity and fabrication. For editors, the threat is a growing "fatberg of hallucinated slop" polluting the information ecosystem. For individuals like Wilson Kaharua, it's a story of hustling to avoid being left behind by a technological tsunami.
AI's transformation of media is not a future threat; it is happening now, starting at the industry's most vulnerable edges. The case of Joseph Wales is a stark, human reminder that behind every suspicious byline and flawless pitch, there may be a real person—resourceful, desperate, and adapting to a world where the machines are writing the rules.
