I don't read The Guardian enough to know if the snark was intentional or not but this line gave me a chuckle,<p>> She does not appear to have social media profiles, though she has two followers on the blogging site Medium.<p>Talk about damning with faint praise!
> 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.<p>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.<p>Apparently reporters found her through some services that connect experts with reporters and I’m guessing the reporters trusted that service.
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 <i>much</i> easier).<p>It really is up to the journalist to verify their sources.<p>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.”<p>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.<p>I wouldn't be surprised to find them using third parties to write their articles or find subject ideas too.
<i>Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun</i><p>Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception <i>possibly</i> of the Telegraph.<p>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.
Abstractly, this is a kind of supply-chain attack.<p>I suspect this type of thing is absolutely <i>rife</i>, 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.
Check out the team of peachesandscreams, where she is listed as an expert.<p>The whole team there looks very suspicious.<p>[1] <a href="https://peachesandscreams.co.uk/pages/about" rel="nofollow">https://peachesandscreams.co.uk/pages/about</a>
> it has raised the issue of how journalists verify the credentials of sources in the AI age<p>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.
> This is not the AI itself that’s at fault here. This is unscrupulous people<p>Isn't this the s/w version of "guns don't kill people, people kill people"?
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.<p>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.