Microsoft Aggregated a Fake Story Claiming Katie Ledecky is Trans
The story came to msn.com via an Indian entertainment site which primarily features aggregated stories from the web, and may have been fully or partially written by AI.
by Evan Urquhart
Microsoft’s news aggregator, which notoriously ditched human editors for AI, has once again featured a false story about the trans community. This time the piece contained the claim the greatest woman swimmer of all time, Katie Ledecky, is transgender (she is not).
The source of the fake story is a website called MEAWW, an Indian entertainment news aggregator which features bland stories containing basic facts about newsworthy figures. MEAWW’s story is headlined “Is Katie Ledecky transgender? Swimmer ties Michael Phelps' record for most individual titles at World Championships” and appeared on the site early yesterday morning. Ledecky has been in the news recently after having tied Michael Phelps’ record for the most individual gold medals at the swimming world championships.
Rumors that Ledecky is trans have circulated online due to assumptions that women athletes can’t really be as good, or as dominant in their sport, as Ledecky has been. Her performance has gone far beyond other women swimmers, including the performance of Lia Thomas, a trans woman who has been vilified after she won a single major college race.
MEAWW’s reported that Ledecky “recently came out as a trans woman.” We’re including a WayBack Machine archive link to the story as we found it, in case any unacknowledged corrections are made.
screenshot from msn.com
Ledecky, of course, did no such thing, and it is difficult to reconstruct how this false claim came to be. There is no source given for the “several reports” the story uses to back up the claim. MEAWW’s website makes no reference to the use of large language models (also referred to as AI) to generate content for the site, but an AI “hallucination” would be a plausible way for a transparently false but plausible-sounding claim to have appeared in a story like this.
The byline for the false story is listed as Srinija Grandhi, whose recent output for MEAWW seems to be about five stories per day. (This is a very large number for a human reporter to produce unaided, though not impossible.) Grandhi was listed as a Trending News Writer for MEAWW on LinkedIn this morning, though the link to her LinkedIn profile currently returns an error message. A google search for Grandhi as of this writing still shows a profile on LinkedIn as a “Trending News Writer” for MEAWW.
screenshot of a Google search for Srinjia Grandhi
In addition to having posted fake stories about bigfoot and mermaids, msn.com previously featured a story from the far-right Daily Caller which falsely claimed that toddlers were getting sex changes at a North Carolina hospital. We reached out to MEAWW and to Grandhi for comment a few hours before publication and will update this story if they respond.