This story of a fictional journalist writing made up AI stories is WILD. Combining the reported fees in the piece and what I know of what the others pay, it's also a very low-paying trick - maybe £1,500 max over four months pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/d...
I also don't know what the solution to this is beyond only commissioning journalists you've met or worked with before (which would suck) because the economics and timescales of journalism don't allow for the kinds of checks that could prevent this
I mean the solution here is fact-checking. Even on a lean editorial team, someone should be searching the names of sources to confirm spelling—I imagine that that’d reveal the fiction. Accepting a pitch from a fabricator has been a known professional hazard since before LLMs.