Quartz feature was 100% written by AI according to Made By Humans
Respected business title Quartz is using a single, hugely prolific journalist heavily aided by AI to produce nearly all its daily website reporting.
It appears to be part of a strategy favouring newsletter output over website journalism.
Canadian software company Redbrick bought Quartz in 2025 and planned to integrate the brand into newsletter monetisation platform Paved. At the time Quartz claimed more than one million newsletter subscribers.
While newsletters offer a direct relationship with known readers, journalism on the open web has become increasingly hard to monetise as referral traffic from Google and social media plunges. These Quartz newsletters appear to offer readers original journalism and Quartz has also recently launched a six-part investigative podcast looking at the world of AI .
But the strategy for the Quartz website appears to be one of filling it with cheaply produced AI-assisted content which mostly consists of rewrites from other sources.
Cris Tolomia wrote at least 52 articles on October 8 alone. Their output covers subjects as diverse as the best dog breeds for children, the energy sector, AI drug research, stock market moves and cybersecurity.
Their total output is likely around 20,000 words per day.
Quartz has published thousands of articles by Tolomia, who has no byline picture and no biography on the site, and no way to contact them via email. They appear to be a digital marketing expert from the Philippines
An email to their listed contact address on contact database Meltwater elicited no response.
Media coverage tracking tool MuckRack lists 9,200 articles by Tolomia, in multiple languages, but almost all of these are either from Quartz, or syndicated versions of Quartz reports on sites such as Yahoo and MSN. They appear to have no published journalism output before March 2026.
Their articles appear to be largely AI-generated, sometimes with human input in their introductory paragraphs.
A check using MadeByHumans , the multi-function AI detector tool developed by Press Gazette and Flip-Pay, found that a news piece headlined: “Americans’ inflation expectations rose to a three-year high in September, NY Fed says”, appears to be 100% AI-generated.
A longer feature piece headlined: “ 25 technology predictions from 30 years ago and how accurate they were “, which was shared on Facebook in June by MIT Media Lab, scores as 100% AI-generated.
Another article headlined: “ Google and Unity are launching an AI platform to build video games from text prompts ” appeared to be 85.2% AI-generated, with some AI-assisted human input.
Almost all of the news on Quartz’s homepage at time of writing was produced by Tolomia, apart from one article by ‘Quartz Staff’ and another by Anthony Lopopolo, who began work at the site in May.
Other writers such as the Manila-based Colleen Cablii appear to have started work in March this year – she lists her skills relating to her job as ‘Content Copywriter’ as ‘Web Content’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’.
‘AI is central to how Quartz publishes the news’
A disclaimer on the Quartz website says: “AI is central to how Quartz reports, produces, and publishes the news. Depending on the story, that means AI tools may help draft, structure, and edit copy, produce supporting images, or manage entire publishing workflows — always with human editorial oversight from Quartz journalists.”
According to Similarweb, Quartz received around 1.8 million website visitors in September. This is around one tenth of the traffic the site was receiving in 2020.
Tolomia’s arrival at the Canada-based business news brand follows a troubled period for the once widely respected and emulated publication.
The Quartz brand has changed hands four times in recent years, after launching in 2012 as a “digitally native news outlet for business people in the new global economy”.
The brand employed more than 200 people at one point, reporting in 115 countries and in 19 languages, but was sold by owner G/O Media in 2025 , with the loss of almost all staff.
G/O Media bought Quartz for under $10m in 2022, and then sold it in April 2025 to Redbrick.
Redbrick CEO Tobyn Sowden said at the time: “As the media landscape continues to shift, the only way to survive and thrive is by embracing the advancements in innovation to connect and engage with audiences.”
Quartz editor-in-chief Dan Hirschorn posted on LinkeiIn this year: “Quartz is starting an exciting new chapter. We’ll have more to share about that later. For now, I’m coming here to do one of my favorite things: hire journalists!
“Three new jobs just posted. All fully remote. These roles reflect some of the areas we’re investing in as we build the next phase of Quartz journalism.”
One of those jobs is ‘Staff Reporter’, the description seen on Cris Tolomia’s byline.
Hirschorn wrote: “We’re also looking for another ambitious and hungry reporter. This is also not a daily news job. It’s an opportunity for a journalist with experience in the fast-paced world of daily business news who is ready to take on high-impact features and enterprise reporting.”
Press Gazette reached out to Quartz via multiple email addresses and to its new owner Redbrick and has so far received no response.
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