Irish Times apologises for hoax AI article about women’s use of fake tan

The Irish Times has apologised for running an article about Irish women’s use of fake tan that was submitted by a hoaxer who apparently used artificial intelligence.

The editor, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, said on Sunday 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 on 11 May from a contributor bylined as Adriana Acosta-Cortez. 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.

On 12 May, a Twitter account in Acosta-Cortez’s name posted a message criticising the Irish Times for running the article. “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.”

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 has been contacted for comment.

In direct messages to the Sunday Independent, the account’s operator said they were a non-binary Irish person who was “stirring the shit” and had repurposed the account, which dates from February 2021, to create the Acosta-Cortez persona. “I made a semi-legitimate Gmail address with no numbers and I also repurposed a Twitter account that I set up during Covid,” they claimed. “I wiped it and followed some accounts, news and Ecuadorian outlets, some Spanish language to make it look legit.”

They said they had used Chat GPT4 to create 80% of the article and the image generator Dall-E 2 to create a profile picture of a quintessential “woke” journalist using the prompts “overweight, blue hair, smug expression”.