This Week in Barrel Scraping: Model Minutae
This might be the most “why is this a news story” story that has ever existed.
by Evan Urquhart
The most fundamental tenet of the news industry is that reporters write about events that happened that are in some way novel or interesting. At Fox, however, the lever saying “MORE TRANS” was pulled so hard it broke off in the operators hand, which is the only reasonable explanation for why they ran a story about a transgender model who did a book interview on CBS for her memoir.
Fox’s headline and opening paragraph report that Geena Rocero, a model from the Phillipenes who came out in 2014, described life for trans people in the US right now as “nightmarish.” The story that follows includes some quotes from the interview talking about Rocero’s experience navigating two cultures and saying it’s important to stand up for trans youth. They don’t seem to have any particular bearing on the question of whether life for trans people is nightmarish or not, which is not terribly surprising given that this is model promoting her memoir on network morning television.
Assigned picked up this story in large part because we wondered if it might have been written by a chatbot. It is extremely bland, with much of the wordcount consumed by quotes that don’t seem to go anywhere, and the rest is boilerplate descriptions of recent political developments around trans issues as conservatives understand them. However, on closer scrutiny we suspect this very bland weird article was written by a human (the byline on it says her name is Lindsay Kornick). That’s because we’re pretty sure a chatbot wouldn’t forget to include a word, as Kornick did in the first paragraph:
screenshot from Fox News
A chatbot which produces text based on the statistical likelihood that some particular word will follow another word would be extremely unlikely to write “described life in the US as a trans person “nightmarish.”
Congrats on passing the Turing Test, Lindsay Kornick!