The Irish Times has apologised for running an article about Irish women’s use of fake tan that was submitted by a hoaxer who used artificial intelligence.
The editor, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, said on Sunday that it had fallen victim to “a deliberate and coordinated deception” that showed a need for stronger controls.
“It was a breach of the trust between the Irish Times and its readers, and we are genuinely sorry. The incident has highlighted a gap in our pre-publication procedures,” he said in a statement.
“We need to make them more robust, and we will. It has also underlined one of the challenges raised by generative AI for news organisations. We, like others, will learn and adapt.”
The paper ran the opinion piece from a contributor bylined as Adriana Acosta-Cortez on 11 May. It accused Irish women who used fake tan of mocking those with naturally dark skin. Acosta-Cortez was described as a 29-year-old Ecuadorian health worker who lived in north Dublin. A profile picture showed a blue-haired woman.
A Twitter account in Acosta-Cortez’s name posted a message the next day criticising the Irish Times for running the article:
https://t.co/UHYCk0lHOe@IrishTimes genuinely sad that a once respectable news source has degraded themselves with such divisive tripe in order to generate clicks and traffic for their website. You need a better screening process than a believable gmail address #buyapaper 🤡
— Adriana Acosta-Cortez (@ecuadorian_adri) May 12, 2023
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It included a link to an Irish Times article from January about robot infiltration of media.
The newspaper deleted the opinion piece within hours and launched a review.
The statement on Sunday confirmed Ireland’s paper of record had been duped. “As in any 24/7 news operation, some days we do better than others. But last Thursday we got it badly wrong,” said Mac Cormaic. “It was a hoax; the person we were corresponding with was not who they claimed to be.”
The article ran under the headline: Irish women’s obsession with fake tan is problematic.
It began: “Dear Irish women, we need to talk about fake tan.” The article said women who artificially darkened their skin were donning an exotic costume.
“Fake tan represents more than just an innocuous cosmetic choice; it raises questions of cultural appropriation and fetishisation of the high melanin content found in more pigmented people.”
The piece was the paper’s second-most read article and prompted debate on radio and social media.
The person who controls Acosta-Cortez’s Twitter account told the Guardian on Sunday, via direct message, that the Irish Times’s apology sidestepped its decision to publish “an incendiary article with an extreme leftwing viewpoint” in pursuit of clicks.
The person said they were Irish, a college student and identified as non-binary. They said they created the Acosta-Cortez persona by repurposing the Twitter account, which dates from February 2021, by using some Spanish and following Ecuadorian outlets.
They said they used GPT-4 to create approximately 80% of the article and the image generator Dalle-E 2 to create a profile picture of a quintessential “woke” journalist using the prompts “female, overweight, blue hair, business casual clothing, smug expression”.
The hoax’s goal was “to give my friends a laugh” and “to stir the shit” in the debate about identity politics.
“Some people have called me an alt-right troll but I don’t think that I am. I think that identity politics is an extremely unhelpful lens through which to interpret the world.”
