On April 11, 2024, Esspots.com published an article claiming that the Grand Ole Opry, the 99-year-old country music venue in Nashville, Tennessee, banned Beyoncé for life because she “isn’t country.” The article began like this:
Breaking: The Grand Ole Opry Bans Beyoncé For Life, ‘Go Play Dress-Up, You’re Not Country’
In a surprising and polarizing move, the Grand Ole Opry has announced that global music icon Beyonce has been banned for life from performing at the iconic venue. The decision comes amid a wave of criticism and debate over the boundaries of country music and the genre’s representation of different musical styles. Let’s delve into the details of this controversial ban and the broader implications it raises for the country music industry.
The article was shared on a Facebook page called the SpaceX Fanclub, where it garnered more than 100,000 reactions and 16,000 comments, many of which suggested users thought the post was genuine. Snopes also received requests from readers asking us to fact-check the post.
The name SpaceX Fanclub may ring a bell to some longtime Snopes readers, as it is strikingly similar to the (now defunct) Facebook page SpaceX Lovers, which Snopes checks countless times for sharing “satirical” news articles.
Indeed, Esspots.com and the SpaceX Fanclub Facebook page are also satirical sites, and the Beyoncé article in question (and everything else on the sites) is not based in reality.
The SpaceX Fanclub Facebook page has an intro section that reads “We post SATIRE, nothing on this page is real”. Esspots.com has an information page which also explains that its content should not be taken seriously.
Welcome to the US page of Esspots (Subsidiary of SpaceXMania.com, specializing in satire and parody news), your one-stop destination for satirical news and commentary about the United States of America. Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire.
On this page, you can expect to find all kinds of funny stories and parodies about US politics, culture and society. From outrageous conspiracy theories to extraordinary political tricks, we’ve got it all covered.
Note the reference to SpaceXMania.com on the About page – another satirical news site that Snopes has frequently fact-checked.
After reading the article, we began to suspect that it was written by an AI tool like ChatGPT. For example, the article uses the word “delve,” a favorite of AI language models, in the first paragraph, and its last paragraph begins with “in conclusion.” Plus, for an article about Beyoncé making country music, it was pretty weird not to mention the singer’s March 2024 country album, Cowboy Carter. Instead, it only mentions “a recent foray into country music with her song ‘Daddy Lessons,’ featured on her critically acclaimed album ‘Lemonade.’ This album was released in 2016, eight years before the article was published.
If the article was written by a model like ChatGPT, that would make sense. Artificial intelligence programs are not always equipped with the ability to provide up-to-date information. To test our theory, Snopes started a new session with ChatGPT and repeatedly asked about “Cowboy Carter” and other breaking news. He was never able to confirm the existence of the album.
With this in mind, we ran the text of the article through various AI detector sites to get a wide range of opinions. Most, but not all, sites agreed that the article was not written by a human.
This isn’t the first time Snopes has verified stories originating from this particular combination of a satirical news site and a Facebook page — we previously verified two different stories about Tim Allen and a third about Taylor Swift. They were all unfaithful.
For background, this is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.
