'Immediate red flags': questions raised over 'expert' much quoted in UK press
28 comments
·April 19, 2025rurp
dullcrisp
I feel if you know anything about British culture, the snark is always intentional.
nomilk
> damning with faint praise
Hadn't encountered this phrase before. TIL.
jfengel
They are usually somewhat staid, but I suspect the opportunity to dig into the Daily Mail was irresistible.
sublimefire
> 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.
duxup
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.
abakker
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.
AStonesThrow
Well they found a sexpert network by mistake. Very innocently of course.
leeoniya
do you mean expertsexchange.com?
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/g228h/til_th...
fallinghawks
As the old saw goes, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
ChrisMarshallNY
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.
bethekidyouwant
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??
rossdavidh
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.
jonas21
Many of the articles where she's quoted predate ChatGPT though.
averageRoyalty
> 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.
levocardia
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!
WaitWaitWha
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.
mmooss
> 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.
mightyham
> 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.
akoboldfrying
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.
jeffbee
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.
keyle
I thought virtually everyone who wrote for the daily mail was a phony /s.
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!