My inbox is full of messages from experts who cold email me asking to be a source for any stories I’m working on. So, at first, the one from Sophie Cress, which invited me to interview her for a future article, seemed typical. “I’ve got over 8 years of experience and qualifications in Psychology and Couples & Family Therapy, and I'm enthusiastic about exploring potential collaborations, especially in the areas of love, relationships, or LGBTQIA+ topics,” Cress wrote. She included a list of links to articles she’d been featured in as an expert. But her email address, which used the domain name SexualAlpha.com, a website that reviews sex toys, gave me pause.
Over on Cress’s therapy website, she was described as a licensed marriage and family therapist in North Carolina, with a master’s degree in couples and family therapy from Antioch University. The site also listed two other certifications—Prepare/Enrich and Gottman Therapist—that many other marriage and family therapists have but not many average people are familiar with.
Yet, for me, a freelance reporter who often writes about mental health and has two decades of therapy under my belt, the tone seemed different from some other therapists’ websites. The biography on the site begins: “Hello beloved, how wonderful to have you here!” In the most prominent headshot photo on the site, a woman strikes a superhero pose, looking up and away from the camera, a sly smile playing on her lips.
I’d come to this website trying to learn more about Cress’s credentials and instead came away with more questions.
Ever since generative AI programs like ChatGPT burst into the public’s consciousness in late 2022, many of our digital experiences have gained a fresh sheen of mistrust. Is it really good advice to put a little glue into your pizza sauce to stop the cheese from sliding off? Is Billy Corgan actually promoting the new Smashing Pumpkins album in eight different languages? Is it really your mother calling to tell you she’s being held captive and if you don’t pay a ransom her kidnappers will kill her?
For journalists, already professionally obligated to be skeptical, that mistrust has to extend to potential sources. Of course, anyone could always claim to be anyone—with all due respect to prostitutes, grifter might actually be the world’s oldest profession. But AI programs make it so incredibly, terrifyingly easy to generate a chunk of text that seems, at least at first skim, like it was written by an expert in any field you can think of.
At the same time, the phone call has started to go the way of the answering machine (remember when we used to…). In our personal lives, texts are faster; in our professional ones, email is how many of us do much of our communicating with the outside world. And when you’re a reporter juggling multiple assignments, an email interview can be tempting. It’s often quicker and more convenient for both the journalist and their source than scheduling a phone call. A site that some reporters (including this one) have used to facilitate these types of interviews is Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which connects journalists with self-identified experts who are able to comment quickly, often over email. The first time I heard from Cress, she emailed me directly, noting that she “saw [my] website” which links to my writing portfolio. The second time, however, she was responding to one of my HARO requests for a story I was writing for another outlet.
(During the time I was reporting this story, HARO became Connectively, a platform owned by the PR-focused software company Cision. In December of last year, Cision shut down Connectively, a decision a spokesperson says was made so the company could focus on CisionOne, their platform that offers media monitoring as well as “journalist outreach tools” for marketing and PR professionals. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the company’s responses to my requests for comment happened before Connectively shut down.)
I responded to Cress’s email pitch, letting her know I’d be interested in interviewing her for an article about how to find a legitimate mental health expert online. She replied a few days later and agreed to the interview, but told me she could only conduct it via email, even after I requested a phone or video meeting. “I'm afraid I can't commit to chat by phone or Zoom as of the moment as I'm constantly on the move so my best option would be through emails for now,” she explained. Once I said I really, truly could only do the interview over Zoom or a phone call, she stopped responding.
One issue with email interviews, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the sender isn’t the one writing the responses. The rise of generative AI chatbots also leaves open the possibility that a reply isn’t even coming from the mind of a human. At least one writer posting on Reddit lamented that some of the responses they’d received from Connectively-sourced experts seemed to be written by AI. Of course, just as a poorly written paragraph doesn't necessarily mean it was crafted by a robot, the use of AI doesn’t inherently mean a source isn’t accurately representing their credentials; there have been reports of people across areas of expertise integrating generative AI tools into their workday. There have also been plenty of reports of people using AI to spread misinformation, revenge porn, and really bad art. As is often the case with emerging technology, we haven’t quite figured out if the pros outweigh the cons.
The stories I’ve seen quoting someone identified as therapist Sophie Cress are typically about relationship topics, like improving your marriage. In those instances, her advice, while technically not bad, is not particularly groundbreaking: “Don't overlook red flags or compromise your standards due to the fear of being alone.” “Engage in open and honest communication with your partner to identify values and aspirations that you share.” But she’s also been tapped to comment on more specific, high-profile news stories: In February, at least one UK-based outlet used quotes attributed to Cress to speculate on how the Princess of Wales’s mental health was faring after abdominal surgery. Her comments—including Very Powerful Quotes like: “From a psychological perspective, it's critical to acknowledge that surgery is a major source of physical and emotional stress”—were picked up by multiple international outlets.
A spokesperson for Cision told Allure that they did not independently verify the credentials of experts on Connectively when it was live, asking journalists to report any concerns at which point the company would “promptly investigate the matter and take appropriate action.” They also stated that when the platform was live the company would “actively scan for spam, plagiarism, and users who routinely pitch beyond their area of expertise, which may result in immediate removal from Connectively.” As the spokesperson put it at the time: “Connectively relies on the integrity and honesty of our community members… We expect all users to truthfully represent their qualifications and expertise.” So, ultimately, it was up to me to determine whether Cress was a reliable source for my article.
After Cress ghosted me on that initial thread where I requested a phone interview, I started a separate chain with questions about her credentials, like asking her to provide proof of her license and degrees, a standard part of source verification, but she never responded to those requests or to any of my follow-ups specifically related to this story.
I also attempted to reach out to the email listed on the contact page of SexualAlpha to confirm Cress’s affiliation with them. Cress’s bio appears on the website’s About page, but it isn’t clear what her role is at the company. SexualAlpha did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
The web copy on SophieCress.com (which, at the time of this story’s publication, is displaying an error message) was easy to approximate in ChatGPT by typing in, “Write a first-person therapist bio that’s warm and personal.” On its own, this didn’t indicate much to me. Many therapists have similar copy on their websites. But when I called Nick Bognar, a licensed Pasadena, California-based marriage and family therapist who I’ve interviewed for many stories over the years, he noted a couple of things about Cress’s website that it’s likely only another therapist would notice. Listing a therapy license number online is required by law in some states, but Bognar said that it’s not uncommon for therapists to do it voluntarily, even providing that information in their email signature so potential clients can easily look them up. Cress doesn’t include her license number on her email or her website, making tracking down her credentials more difficult.
The whole sex toy review site thing also seemed unusual to Bognar. Not so much the fact that Cress is associated with a brand—after all, medical professionals of all types are getting in on the sponsored-content game these days—but that she used a SexualAlpha email alias for her outreach to me. Most corporations don’t just give email addresses out to anyone, so this implies that she’s employed by this sex toy website in some capacity and that, in a sense, when reaching out to journalists as an expert source, whoever was sending the email was doing so on behalf of SexualAlpha.
Roger Smith, chief advocacy officer for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), has yet to come across a confirmed case of a brand inventing a therapist to pitch to journalists, but when I posited the theory they agreed it’s possible. As James Punelli, director of ethics and legal affairs at the AAMFT, put it: “The barrier [to do that] is very low.” And they have seen people impersonate therapists to offer therapy, or people without an active license try to dole out therapy.
I searched Cress’s name on the North Carolina Marriage and Family Therapy Licensure Board website. No one with the name “Sophie Cress,” “Sophia Cress” or “Sofia Cress,” let alone anyone with the last name Cress, is a licensed therapist in that state. And where her website said that she had two certifications specific to relationship therapy—Gottman Therapist and Prepare/Enrich—neither organization could confirm that a person with her name is certified. (Prepare/Enrich mentioned in an email to me that although they couldn’t find anyone with Cress’s name, it’s possible she is certified under a maiden name or married name. Cress refers to her husband as first-name-only “Gary” on her website. Allure could not find any marriage or public records on a Gary connected to a Sophie Cress.) Due to the limited personal details I had about Sophie, I couldn’t confirm she actually had a master’s degree or even an undergraduate degree from the universities she says she attended. I also couldn’t find a therapist named Sophie Cress, or anyone with a similar name, on LinkedIn or in Psychology Today’s database of therapists.
Here’s the information that I could find online about Sophie Cress: the bio on her own website, the bio on SexualAlpha, a now-silent X account, where she primarily posts relationship advice with reposts of some pop culture videos and one repost that reads, “I miss when AI stood for Allen Iverson.” And then there are the dozen or so mental health-related articles in which she’s quoted, including some published by other outlets owned by Allure's parent company Condé Nast.
In many of the stories that use Cress as a source, her name links back to SexualAlpha.com. A quick scroll down that site’s homepage and you’ll see all the prestigious publications the company claims to have been featured in. So I had to ask myself: Is boosting SexualAlpha’s traffic the endgame here? Is “Sophie Cress” a ploy to drive more visitors to a site that reviews sex toys?
In addition to Cress, SexualAlpha’s About page lists two other “public faces”—Aliyah Moore, and the managing editor, Dainis Graveris—and notes, “We have several more full-time team members who prefer to stay behind the scenes.” People identified as Moore and Graveris have also been quoted in articles related to sexual health and wellness, including in other Condé Nast outlets.
According to Graveris’s LinkedIn profile, he is based in Latvia. At one point, his profile and now-deleted Instagram account stated that he was the chief operating officer at Biodenix, “a global health media network group with a vast network portfolio of properties and assets spanning across various sectors, industries, and topics within the global health and wellness industry.” (At the time of publication, Graveris’s LinkedIn profile no longer mentions Biodenix, though several data broker sites—that is, a website that scrapes other websites to aggregate people's contact, employment, and other personal information—lists his role as COO.)
The personal website for someone named Aliyah Moore, who claims to work for SexualAlpha, stated she has a PhD in gender and sexuality studies from the University of Arizona, a degree program I confirmed does not currently exist at the school. The school also confirmed they did not have a record of anyone named Aliyah Moore as a 2017 graduate (the year she claims to have graduated) from the school’s Gender & Women’s Studies program, which was the most similar degree the school offers. In addition to having been quoted in a number of online articles about sex advice, Moore seems to have written some herself. She did not reply to my request for an interview for this story.
Moore and Cress’s personal websites, as well as the SexualAlpha About page, include headshots of the two women. Allure found the same portraits on stock photo sites—and the images have been used on several other websites that seem unrelated to SexualAlpha. The model whose photo appears to depict Cress has a different name. The photographers for both as well as the model credited in the apparent stock photos used on Cress’s site did not respond to requests for comment.
Before this story was set to be published, the websites for Sophie Cress, Aliyah Moore, and Biodenix could no longer be accessed (though the LinkedIn page for Biodenix is still live). SexualAlpha’s website appeared to be back online after also displaying a similar error message.
Graveris did not respond to multiple requests for comment nor did Biodenix. I attempted to reach out to Biodenix via the form on its website, which was the only way I could find to contact the company.
Biodenix’s About page stated that the company has existed since 1995, offering “expertise in supplying healthcare and lifestyle research and insights.” Allure was able to find one article about the company and its work, an interview with CEO James Richman about AI’s potential to lower medical costs. I attempted to contact Richman but received no response to my requests for comment.
When the Biodenix website was live, it included a section called, “Our Health & Wellness Network” that outlined “a collection of assets and properties that are owned by us and our partners, all focused on promoting health and wellness.” In addition to SexualAlpha, some of these “assets and properties” included the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC), the Journal of Neuroscience, Science World Report, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Allure reached out to all the companies listed on the page for which we could find contact information. As of press time, only three—SOGC, The Journal of Neuroscience, and CellPress—have replied, all saying that they do not have any relationship with Biodenix.
So what is going on here? Most of us understand that mathematical algorithms drive our digital experiences and by extension our culture, including—most importantly—our buying habits. If you express an interest in puffer coats one day, you’re going to get spoon-fed puffer coat content for the next week or so. Determined to find out how a probably fictional Sophie might fit into this datasphere, I got on Zoom with Austin Kane, a director from a New York-based digital strategy agency. Kane hadn’t heard of Sophie Cress or SexualAlpha, but his take was that the SexualAlpha website had the hallmarks of a well-known strategy called EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Basically, search engines like Google say they prioritize sites that publish viable information that’s helpful to consumers. These search engines use algorithms they claim help determine that viability, rewarding sites that score highly by placing them high on the list of links that show up when you search for something.
In a tactic that is at least the cousin of the celebrity brand ambassador marketing strategy, brands will also sometimes hire expert spokespeople to make their company seem more legit. Aligning with a pro means that people who end up on your site might be more likely to (literally or figuratively) buy what you’re selling. According to Kane, by pitching out an expert who then requests a backlink to their website (a common favor granted by journalists in exchange for the expert’s time), sites like SexualAlpha could theoretically be creating multiple footprints across the web to gain legitimacy and therefore show up higher in your search results. There is an article on StarterStory.com called “My Sex Toy Review Site Is Visited By Nearly 1 Million People Per Month” that appears to be an interview with Graveris. In it, he notes that getting Sexual Alpha featured on other sites was a priority when first starting the company. “If one of the websites we’ve reached out to featured us, interested readers will be redirected to our website, where they learn more about us, what we offer, the sex advice we give, and the sex toys we recommend,” Graveris said. “This approach has helped us get more SEO traffic juice.” (Though he also notes that “we spend crazy long hours researching, scouring forums, reading real-user feedback, and testing different sex toys ourselves before we write our reviews.”)
Davis Thompson, a spokesperson for Google, said the company is making updates to its algorithm that might combat some of this gamification. “Our ranking systems are designed to surface content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness,” Thompson said. “There are a variety of factors that contribute to quality, like whether the content offers a unique perspective or insight, and whether someone put in effort to produce something satisfying and useful. We've recently launched updates to tackle low-quality, spammy content, whether it's created by AI or other means.” The EEAT strategy applies to editorial sites too: Theoretically, Google would rank an Allure story that cites several qualified sources higher than a blogger’s op-ed on the same topic.
The more mentions and direct links a website can get on other prominent websites, the better its search ranking, according to Thompson. This sort of visibility potentially leads to more income for the person or group who owns the site via ads that generate revenue from traffic or affiliate programs that pay out based on how many people click on a link. “It’s very easy to gamify the web,” Kane told me. Over on Reddit, some conversations from months back about Connectively included replies from purported PR and marketing professionals. They were talking about pitching clients to journalists so they could “get links” in articles and complaining they weren't getting enough of them.
In addition to being affiliated with sources who can comment on stories for other outlets, SexualAlpha publishes content on its website, mainly roundups of the “best sex toys” that look similar to the types of articles you’d see on any lifestyle website that also publishes product reviews. The site publishes lists of links and brief descriptions of the corresponding products likely to generate what’s known as “affiliate earnings.” When you click and buy, the site gets a percentage of the sale. SexualAlpha includes a disclaimer at the bottom of its website: "SexualAlpha participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites." In the Starter Story article, Graveris claimed that, at the timing of writing (which, based on the link's metadata, appears to have been October 2022) SexualAlpha.com was getting about 900,000 visits and making about $10,000 per month on affiliate commissions.
On some websites, artificial intelligence is playing a role in this strategy. And this marketing approach—using AI to create content—is becoming much more common, Kane told me, with the rise of generative AI chatbots and AI image and video creators. More and more, we find ourselves surrounded by AI slop, the term for computer-generated garbage content that plagues an increasingly large chunk of the internet. It's like email spam, but for every digital platform you could think of. As Max Read reported last year in New York Magazine, almost any industry that provides the opportunity for some sort of profit (like affiliate programs) also creates opportunities for the slop-makers. And it’s rendering much of the internet useless. “The slop tide threatens some of the key functions of the web, clogging search results with nonsense, overwhelming small institutions, and generally polluting the already fragile information ecosystem of the internet,” Read wrote.
But AI doesn’t have to be involved for slop to be created. Humans are perfectly capable of producing low-quality content and spreading misinformation. There is at least one case of a tech conference founder being accused of inventing speakers. In November 2023, news broke about a male tech conference founder being accused of creating fake female speakers to boost diversity stats at his software developers conference. The organizer admitted via his X account that one of the featured speakers on the conference's website was an “auto-generated” woman with a random title he had created while building the site. He said that he delayed taking it off while searching for a real speaker and acknowledged it was a mistake, but denied it was an attempt to meet diversity criteria and refused to apologize. He did not appear to address allegations of other “fake” listed speakers, including in previous years. Days later, 404 Media alleged in their report that the same man appeared to be behind “the most popular coding account on Instagram” fronted by a woman apparently named Julia Kirsina. He did not respond to their requests for comment on these allegations.
Technically, Sophie Cress, with her as-of-now unreachable website, remains a mystery, though I feel pretty confident I understand what’s going on here. And 3,000 words into this story, I’m sure you do too. While this is unlikely to be some sort of election-altering Russian disinformation campaign, I wouldn’t say it’s a sign of a particularly bright future. Hopefully, those promised Google algorithm updates will change the landscape enough that whoever is behind these spammy websites decides it’s not worth the effort to try to dupe journalists.
But with more tech companies embracing AI (Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, recently rolled out a product that allows users to create AI characters that the company expects will “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, told the Financial Times) and becoming ambivalent about facts (Meta also recently announced the end of its fact-checking program) it seems likely that the situation will get worse before (if ever) it gets better.
In the meantime, we humans should do what we can from our little corners of this slop-infested world. Allure has long discouraged its reporters from conducting email interviews—making rare exceptions only for longtime sources whose identities the team has already verified—and, to the brand's knowledge, has never interacted with a fake source. The therapists I investigated in this piece have never been quoted in Allure.
As a freelance reporter, from here on out, emails with potential sources who won’t get on the phone or Zoom will go in the trash with no exceptions. On top of verifying someone’s identity the best I can, I also usually learn more and get better quotes this way. Plus, writing can be an isolating gig. Talking to another person is refreshing.
And for everyone else… good luck out there. From banal relationship advice to computer-generated images of girls carrying puppies during a flood, AI is getting very good at generating content that feels real to a lot of people. Some experiments have found that people prefer AI-generated content to human-generated stuff or at least can’t tell the difference. Even when content is human-generated, it seems that many prefer to embrace vibes over truth. But, and perhaps this is old-fashioned, I happen to believe that facts matter. A lot. It’s possible that one day we’ll figure out how to integrate this technology into society in a way that makes people’s lives easier without spreading lies and misinformation. For now, though, maintaining that sheen of mistrust in all our digital interactions might be our only hope.
Kara McGrath contributed reporting.
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