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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#41

Post by marscopter »

rectang wrote: post #4
LiamPowell wrote: post #3

> Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. Once upon a time, completely falsifying a quote would be…

When such things have happened in the past, they've led to an investigation and the appointment of a Public Editor or an Ombud. (e.g. Jayson Blair.) I'm willing to weigh a post mortem from Ars Technica about what happened, and to see what they offer as a durable long term solution.

There is a post on their forum from what appears to Ars Technica staff saying that they're going to perform an investigation.[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

The discourse in the Rust community is way better than that, and I believe being a toxic shit-hat in that community would lead to immediate consequences. Even when there was very serious controversy (the canceled conference talk about reflection) it was deviously phrased through reverse psychology where those on the wronged side wrote blogposts expressing their deep 'heartbreak' and 'weeping with pain and disappointment' about what had transpired. Of course, the fiction was blatant, but also effective.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#43

Post by zahlman »

zozbot234 wrote: post #6

If an AI can fabricate a bunch of purported quotes due to being unable to access a page, why not assume that the exact same sort of AI can also accidentally misattribute hostile motivation or intent (such as gatekeeping or envy - and let's not pretend that butthurt humans don't do this all the time, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fundamental_attribution_error ) for an action such as rejecting a pull request? Why a…

> Why are we treating the former as a mere mistake, and the latter as a deliberate attack?

"Deliberate" is a red herring. That would require AI to have volition, which I consider impossible, but is also entirely beside the point. We also aren't treating the fabricated quotes as a "mere mistake". It's obviously quite serious that a computer system would respond this way and a human-in-the-loop would take it at face value. Someone is supposed to have accountability in all of this.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#44

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

The ars technica twist is a brutal wakeup call that I can't actually tell what is ai slob garbage shit by reading it- and even if I can't tell, that doesn't mean it's fine because the crap these companies are shoveling is still wrong, just stylistically below my detectability.

I think I need to log off.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#45

Post by zahlman »

sneak wrote: post #20

Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland are the names of the authors in the byline of the now-removed Ars piece with the entirely fabricated quotes that didn’t bother to spend thirty seconds fact checking them before publishing. Their byline is on the archive.org link, but this post declines to name them. It shouldn’t. There ought to be social consequences for using machines to mindlessly and recklessly libel people. These peop…

> Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, covering topics ranging from retro games to new gaming hardware, business and legal developments in the industry, fan communities, gaming mods and hacks, virtual reality, and much more.

I knew I recognized the name....

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#46

Post by netsharc »

giobox wrote: post #39
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for. The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened. I loved Ars in the early years…

Probably "one bad apple", soon to be fired, tarred and feathered...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#47

Post by prussia »

trollbridge wrote: post #7
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

The amount of effort to click an LLM’s sources is, what, 20 seconds? Was a human in the loop for sourcing that article at all?

The kind of people to use LLM to write news article for them tend not to be the people who care about mundane things like reading sources or ensuring what they write has any resemblance to the truth.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#48

Post by zozbot234 »

zahlman wrote: post #43
zozbot234 wrote: post #6

If an AI can fabricate a bunch of purported quotes due to being unable to access a page, why not assume that the exact same sort of AI can also accidentally misattribute hostile motivation or intent (such as gatekeeping or envy - and let's not pretend that butthurt humans don't do this all the time, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fundamental_attribution_error ) for an action such as rejecting a pull request? Why a…

> Why are we treating the former as a mere mistake, and the latter as a deliberate attack? "Deliberate" is a red herring. That would require AI to have volition, which I consider impossible, but is also entirely beside the point. We also aren't treating the fabricated quotes as a "mere mistake". It's obviously quite serious that a computer system would respond this way and a human-in-the-loop would take it at face va…

I wrote 'treating' as a deliberate attack, which matches the description in the author's earlier blogpost. Acknowledging this doesn't require attaching human-like volition to AIs.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#49

Post by pixl97 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #35
phire wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans aren't very diligent in the long term. If an LLM does something correctly enough times in a row (or close enough), humans are likely to stop checking its work throughly enough. This isn't exactly a new problem we do it with any bit of new software/hardware, not just LLMs. We check its work when it's new, and then tend to trust it over time as it proves itself. But it seems to be hitting us worse with LLMs, as…

It’s a core part of the job and there’s simply no excuse for complacency.

The words on the page are just a medium to sell ads. If shit gets ad views then producing shit is part of the job... unless you're the one stepping up to cut the checks.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#50

Post by anonymous908213 »

gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé,

No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.

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