Is fake tan racist?
It’s not a question you would have heard being asked a decade ago.
But the editors of the Irish Times took it upon themselves to wade in on the increasingly divisive world of identity politics and culture wars by posting a heated opinion piece by blue-haired Latinx (a gender-neutral term for someone from Latin America) healthcare administrator Adriana Acosta-Cortez last Thursday.
“Dear Irish women, we need to talk about fake tan,” the piece started, in a clear sign of the patronising commentary to come.
“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,” Acosta-Cortez continued.
“When a white Irish woman dons fake tan for a night out, she is wearing a costume that allows her to experience a fleeting taste of a more exotic identity, with none of the obstacles people of colour face.”
In around 1,500 words, Acosta-Cortez, who on Twitter describes herself as a “cat mom living, learning, and loving in Dublin City! Connoisseur of coffee and intermediate ceramicist”, laid down her anti-fake tan manifesto.
There was just one small problem that would lead the Irish Times to hastily delete the commendably opinionated column: It was all a load of AI-generated bollocks created on ChatGPT by a pseudonymous online troll.
Even Acosta-Cortez’s profile picture as printed in the newspaper was the product of AI image generator Dalle-E-2.
Though managing to get through the newspaper’s chain of command with seeming ease, Twitter users cottoned onto the fact pretty quickly.
Bit weird that the Irish Times published a ragebait opinion piece about how fake tan is cultural appropriation written by someone with absolutely no digital footprint and a professional headshot that looks AI-generated pic.twitter.com/kVFUY00AuG
— kevin (@KevBeirne) May 12, 2023
The person controlling ‘Acosta-Cortez’s’ Twitter handle explained that their intention was “to give my friends a laugh” and “to stir shit” around the whole identity politics debate.
The profile picture was intended to represent a generic “woke” journalist, using the Dalle-E-2 prompts “female, overweight, blue hair, business casual clothing, smug expression”.
“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,” the person told The Guardian on Sunday.
Regardless of your feelings toward the stunt and identity politics in general, the balls up exposed a flaw in the Irish Times’ quality-control systems that all major publications should take note of.
“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,” ‘Acosta-Cortez’ Tweeted following the piece’s publication (you can still read it here if you wish).
The original article as published by The Irish Times – Source: archive.is via @ecuadorian_adri
Acknowledging his mistake, editor Ruadhan Mac Cormaic today said his paper was "genuinely sorry" for publishing the fake article.
"The incident has highlighted a gap in our pre-publication procedures. We need to make them more robust - and we will," he said in a letter from the editor, calling the hoax a "deliberate deception".
In the Irish Times’ defence, newspapers have an obligation to make people’s opinions heard, even outlandish ones about racist cosmetics, but it’s probably best to run them through a few AI checks first.