GAN-tastic gambling reviews
Gambling review website Casino Today's experts and their alleged decades of experience do not, in fact, exist
If you’re looking for top-notch content and reviews from experts and authors with decades of experience in the gambling industry, the website Casino Today (casinotoday.com) would appear to have you covered. A closer look reveals some issues, however, as all five alleged members of the Casino Today team have StyleGAN-generated faces. Their articles generally contain rephrased versions of content available elsewhere on the internet, and often feature bizarre wording. Additionally, internet searches reveal no evidence that any of the accomplishments or biographical details listed in the Casino Today contributors’ biographies are real.
StyleGAN-generated faces such as those used to represent Casino Today’s team members can be quite convincing at first glance, but they contain a variety of indicators of their artificial origin. One of the most obvious of these is extremely consistent positioning of facial features, especially the eyes, which are always anchored 3/4 of the distance from the edge of the image to the center horizontally, and 15/16 of the distance from the top to the center vertically. Although this particular fingerprint can be obfuscated by cropping, rotating, or zooming the image, other tells such as surreal clothing or hats, mismatched earrings, asymmetrical eyeglasses, physics-defying hair, and nonsensical backgrounds remain, and this particular type of synthetic face image can be easily identified by humans with a bit of practice.
Casino Today’s articles are mostly reviews of various gambling products, both online gambling sites as well as physical casino games. These “reviews” tend to be more press release-esque than critical in nature, and consist of information that can easily be found elsewhere on the internet. The wording of the articles is often bizarre, with phrases like “the very newest slot machine of the company” being used instead of the more expected “the company’s newest slot machine”, as seen in the screenshot above. Plausible explanations for the unusual phrasing range from various types of automatic text generation and rewording tools to translation errors (either machine or human).
As it turns out, the current Casino Today site is not the first haven of low-effort internet content to bear the domain name casinotoday.com. Wayback Machine archives indicate that from 1999 to 2007, the domain belonged to a site billing itself as “The Original Casino & Sportsbook Directory”. The domain was parked from sometime in 2007 until late 2019, when a precursor to the current version started to take shape, and the current lineup of GAN-faced authors was in place by summer 2023. (Interestingly, the domain belonging to former print publication Gambling Times recently experienced a similar makeover involving authors with GAN-generated faces, but in that case the business name itself was purchased.)
As mentioned earlier, the synthetically generated faces are not the only sign that the Casino Today team members are not real people. For instance, Editor in Chief “Jerome Beatty” has, per his biography, written multiple books and runs a successful YouTube channel on blackjack. Google and DuckDuckGo searches for “Jerome Beatty blackjack” turn up no evidence that any such books have ever been published, however, and YouTube search results similarly contain no sign of the alleged editor’s “successful YouTube channel”.
According to her biography, Casino Today editor “Marilyn Chavez” is a researcher at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Google and DuckDuckGo search results, as well as the search function on Missouri S&T’s own website turn up no indication that anyone by that name is affiliated with the university, however. Similarly, there is no evidence that the 2019 TED Talk ever happened.
Casino Today staff writer “Thomas Orozco” has supposedly competed in a variety of poker tournaments, including three successive appearances in the World Series of Poker finals. Major search engines as well as the WSOP website are unsurprisingly devoid of any evidence to support this alleged career, however. The biographies of the remaining two Casino Today team members (“Susan Davis” and “William Russel”) lack anecdotes specific enough to easily fact-check, but between the GAN-generated faces and the lack of legitimacy of pretty much everything else associated with the site, there is no reason to believe that anything in any of the biographies is accurate.