startup idea - provide personal security services to people targeted by AI.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
211–220 of 670 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?
You could read the original blog post...
How could that prove hallucinations? It could only possibly prove that they are not. If the quotes are in the original post then they are not hallucinations. If they are not in the post they could be caused by something is not a LLM.
Misquotes and fabricated quotes have existed long before AI, And indeed, long before computers.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#213Ars 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.
Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could read the original blog post...
How could that prove hallucinations? It could only possibly prove that they are not. If the quotes are in the original post then they are not hallucinations. If they are not in the post they could be caused by something is not a LLM. Misquotes and fabricated quotes have existed long before AI, And indeed, long before computers.
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…
Excellent observation. I get so frustrated every time I hear the "we have test-suites and can test deterministically" argument. Have we learned absolutely nothing from the last 40 years of computer science? Testing does not prove the absence of bugs.
Don't worry, the LLM also makes the tests. /s
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#216Ars 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.
Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…
- There’s a difference. Users don’t see code, only its output. Writing is “the output”.
- A rough equivalent here would be Windows shipping an update that bricks your PC or one of its basic features, which draws plenty of outrage. In both cases, the vendor shipped a critical flaw to production: factual correctness is crucial in journalism, and a quote is one of the worst things to get factually incorrect because it’s so unambiguous (inexcusable) and misrepresents who’s quoted (personal).
I’m 100% ok with journalists using AI as long as their articles are good, which at minimum requires factual correctness and not vacuous. Likewise, I’m 100% ok with developers using AI as long as their programs are good, which at minimum requires decent UX and no major bugs.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#217I'm rather disappointed Scott didn't even acknowledge the AI's apology post later on. I mean, leave the poor AI alone already - it admitted its mistake and seems to have learned from it. This is not a place where we want to build up regret.
If AIs decide to wipe us out, it's likely because they'd been mistreated.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have an opportunity to do the right thing. I don't think everyone will be outraged at the idea that you are using AI to assist in writing your articles. I do think many will be outraged by trying to save such a small amount of face and digging yourself into a hole of lies.
This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis. This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.
Absolutely inevitable if you condone using GAI to ‘assist’ in writing. The inevitable outcome is reporters just writing prompts and giving it a quick once over, then skipping the last step because they believe the companies selling generative AI and/or are under time pressure and it seems good enough.
They are word generators. That is their function, so if you use them words will be generated that are not yours and which are sometimes nonsense and made up.
The problem here was not plagiarism but generated falsehoods.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#219I just wonder why this hate piece is still on GitHub.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you. EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for t…
We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception. Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere…
That's what bylines are for, though. Both authors are attributed, and are therefore both responsible. If they didn't both review the article before submitting that's their problem. It's exaggerating to call this throwing away two lives, if all they do for a living is hit the big green button on crap journalism then I'm fine with them re-skilling to something less detrimental.