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'Immediate red flags': questions raised over 'expert' much quoted in UK press
by mellosouls
I don't read The Guardian enough to know if the snark was intentional or not but this line gave me a chuckle,
> She does not appear to have social media profiles, though she has two followers on the blogging site Medium.
Talk about damning with faint praise!
I feel if you know anything about British culture, the snark is always intentional.
> damning with faint praise
Hadn't encountered this phrase before. TIL.
> an internet meme (...) ironically praising the film Morbius as simply "one of the movies of all time", without any adjective.
Nice. I'll use that one.
Surprised you hadn't heard it before, my peer group uses it a lot, also in the sense of "well that was something".
They are usually somewhat staid, but I suspect the opportunity to dig into the Daily Mail was irresistible.
> Her qualifications are described there as “psychologist and sex adviser – University of Oxford”. However, the British Psychological Society (BPS) said she was not one of its members.
It appears as they could not verify if she was in Oxford at all. If there is no way to check that then anyone could pretend. I would not be surprised if anyone was just relying on the choice of words Santini used when communicating, appearing as overly educated in the British system.
Very interesting article. This ‘person’ has a commercial sex related website and some medium posts but no presence otherwise.
Apparently reporters found her through some services that connect experts with reporters and I’m guessing the reporters trusted that service.
They’re called expert networks. Usually, basic research practices like “fact checking” and “sample size” apply. I guess they just decided on the lottery approach.
Well they found a sexpert network by mistake. Very innocently of course.
do you mean expertsexchange.com?
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/g228h/til_th...
As the old saw goes, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
And nowadays it's not even a dog but an Aibo...
I don’t see it all with this has to do with AI but I guess no one can write an article without adding the word AI somewhere??
You're not wrong, but the suspicion is that the person used AI (ChatGPT or similar LLM) to write answers to the reporters' questions. No evidence presented for that, though, so while I could well believe it I think your criticism is valid.
I do think that the BS-as-a-service aspect of LLM's makes it harder for many people to tell if they're talking to an expert. The optimistic scenario is that this will eventually cause people to be more suspicious of trusting any online source they don't otherwise know anything about.
Many of the articles where she's quoted predate ChatGPT though.
[dead]
This isn’t really anything new (as has been pointed out). AI will make this kind of impersonation a lot easier, and harder to detect (I think the xz utils hacker spent a bunch of time manufacturing a fake back trail. AI will make that stuff much easier).
It really is up to the journalist to verify their sources.
It’s really common for corporate marketing departments to write copy wholesale, so their corporate glossary gets pumped.
> Charlie Beckett, the leader of the journalism and AI project at the London School of Economics, said: “This is about long-running pressures on journalists to be quicker. This is not the AI itself that’s at fault here. This is unscrupulous people, it seems. It is a wake-up call to all of us, frankly.”
Agreed Charlie, but not the way you meant it. The unscrupulous bunch here is lazy journos using UberEats for quotes rather than actually finding and speaking to an expert.
I wouldn't be surprised to find them using third parties to write their articles or find subject ideas too.
Hear,hear.
It is quite amusing to observe how certain media outlets, which often adopt a self-righteous stance, are now expressing indignation after being exposed for their inaccuracies. They seem to have convinced themselves that they possess the ability to discern genuine expertise, leading them to believe that such experts do not require thorough vetting.
> now expressing indignation
Who is expressing indignation?
> They seem to have convinced themselves that they possess the ability to discern genuine expertise, leading them to believe that such experts do not require thorough vetting.
Speaking of careful reporting, can you back that up?
Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
My deepest apologies for insufficiently distilling my thoughts for you.
> Who is expressing indignation?
The media is irate and resentful for having been flummoxed by some no-good knave. (third paragraph of the article notes several of them - Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the BBC)
> Speaking of careful reporting, can you back that up?
> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
I beg to differ, and since i am very bored, I had the 3 minutes to find these.
In 2019, Metro published a story about a "haunted" doll, later criticized for lack of verification; the article was quietly removed from their website after public backlash. A 2015 Cosmopolitan article on beauty trends was pulled after it misrepresented cultural practices without proper research. The i newspaper in their 2021 article on Brexit was heavily criticized for unverified claims about trade disruptions. In 2018, the Express removed an article claiming a celebrity’s health scare without sufficient evidence, following legal threats. In 2017, a Hello! story about a royal family event was withdrawn online after inaccuracies about attendees were exposed. The Daily Star's article in 2016 about a UFO sighting was removed after it was revealed to be based on a hoax. In 2017, the Daily Mail retracted a story about an immigrant crime wave after data was found to be misrepresented. The Sun withdrew in 2015 a front-page story claiming a celebrity scandal after evidence was debunked.
Aaaand, here I ran out of bourbon. I mean, I stopped pulling together the BBC articles that had to be withdrawn so I am just giving up the pleasure of finding them to you.
> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.
It is no great mystery why journalists so rarely turn their pens against their own. In a profession already fading into irrelevance, its influence waning, its audience drifting elsewhere, few are eager to hasten the decline by airing their own failings. Pride and self-preservation conspire to maintain a hollow façade of credibility, even as the foundations rot away. Better, it seems, to pretend the edifice still stands strong than to admit it is already half-forgotten.
> The media is irate and resentful for having been flummoxed by some no-good knave. (third paragraph of the article notes several of them - Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the BBC)
The third paragraph says nothing about irate or resentful (see below), nor does any other part of the article. Did you - the great journalism critic - fabricate it?
The case has been described as a wake-up call for newsrooms, as AI tools make it far easier for bad actors to invent supposed experts for their own purposes. Santini’s output has been prolific, with comments in Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun in recent years. She was also quoted in an article for the BBC’s international site, BBC.com.
> I beg to differ, and since i am very bored, I had the 3 minutes to find these. ...
There are thousands of articles a day, maybe tens of thousands, in the high-quality professional media. You naming a few with errors from a ten years period doesn't amount to much.
> It is no great mystery why journalists so rarely turn their pens against their own.
A conspiracy! Do you have evidence? You criticize the journalists for a lack of accuracy and research - where is yours?
Here's some evidence the other way: Fox constantly attacks publications that differ politically; Fox's errors are reported widely; today's NYT reports on a libel suit against itself; regarding this particular error: "Questions over Santini were first raised by the Press Gazette."
How do you know about the errors? Where did you find the errors listed above?
Ah, ye're a feisty one, ain’t ye? Lots o' questions, but few answers.
I would love to dwell into this, alas as i wrote, I am out of bourbon so cannot untangle your relative privation, tu quoque, and what-aboutism.
I make clear factual claims and show the evidence. You not only don't address anything on that level, you can't even find the right cheap insults.
Except the bar is even lower -- instead of walking three blocks to a bodega for a sandwich, the standard here is just google her to make sure she's actually an Oxford-affiliated expert! It would take like three seconds!
Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun
Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception possibly of the Telegraph.
I feel like readers should be able to think critically about their news sources, and expect and discount low quality content from tabloids, rather than blindly believing everything that's fed to them, either by gatekeepers in the traditional media, or on social media.
You can definitely include The Telegraph, and certainly The Times as well, I had to cancel my subscription to that, which was only £1 a month, because of their columnists who were SO terrible that I couldn’t face it anymore. These papers are so short of actual journalists now, it seems that only The Cardigan and the FT have people who care about reporting.
You’re forgetting the BBC also featured this person (according to the article) and has recently been in trouble with its sources regarding Gaza. The Guardian also featured them in an advertising feature rather than in editorial.
Abstractly, this is a kind of supply-chain attack.
I suspect this type of thing is absolutely rife, because it can happen in any system where participants don't all have end-to-end visibility of each other. The main force against it is the threat of reputational damage, which usually prompts some level of red tape, but no one likes red tape.
> which usually prompts some level of red tape, but no one likes red tape.
we’re finding out in real time very good reasons why some red tape exists.
Because of a black pen?
Check out the team of peachesandscreams, where she is listed as an expert.
The whole team there looks very suspicious.
To be noted, a lot of PR agency discreetly push advertisement for companies as contributors to infomercial articles on their domain.
> it has raised the issue of how journalists verify the credentials of sources in the AI age
Performing background checks is not difficult. Professional background check services are fast and commonly used in hiring processes. It seems like this article is (deliberately?) missing the actual questions raised by this case: why are these various outlets/journalists so lacking in rigor when it comes to the accuracy of their content, and how is a fraudulent expert consistently being chosen for their articles.
Now do Oren Cass, who inexplicably gets a regular by-line as "economist" in the New York Times when he is not one, and lacks even the vaguest qualifications for the description.
Isn't anyone who handled some money at some point or has some opinions these days an economist? Or does that actually relate to any kind of educational standard?
Well, Katy Perry and five of her most GLAM friends were in "outer space" by 6km and about 3 minutes, so she is obviously an astronaut by conventional definition. And I am a gynecologist. Ask me anything!
I thought virtually everyone who wrote for the daily mail was a phony /s.
> This is not the AI itself that’s at fault here. This is unscrupulous people
Isn't this the s/w version of "guns don't kill people, people kill people"?
Articles quoting Barbara Santini predate ChatGPT (e.g: [0]), so I'd assume at least this instance really is just human unscrupulousness and human laziness. Or rather, a drive to pump out articles for ad revenue leads to just rearranging what some PR agency, forum user, or other article is reporting, contributing no real investigation or verification.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211119031841/https://www.shape...
I have issues with a lot of the medical staff that the media really likes. They are very often wrong and out of date its pretty concerning that they are reassuring people when they shouldn't be. But the media wants reassurance right now that actually Covid isn't dangerous and are seeking out the doctors who will say that yes actually the 500k papers saying it causes all sorts of problems are all wrong and its just a cold.
The UK media has a long history of doing this, it turned up to Andrew Wakefield's house and saw his lab in a shed and said "yep this is a reliable doctor and we should tell everyone MMR causes autism", the fall out of which we are still suffering from all over the globe. It was fraud and the media knew it.
Crafted by Rajat
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