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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

#221

Post by danaris »

bombcar wrote: post #190
usefulposter wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like in the original thread that was wiped ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384 ), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast. All threads have since been locked: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-t…

Ars Technika has fallen substantially from the heady era of Siracusa macOS reviews.

Yeah, the Condé Nast buyout really crippled what was an amazing independent tech news site.

The sad thing is, I don't know of anywhere else that comes close to what Ars was before.

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

#222

Post by tempestn »

DonHopkins wrote: post #213
Lerc wrote: post #169

Earlier 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?

[flagged]

I think you're missing their point. The question you're replying to is, how do we know that this made up content is a hallucination. Ie., as opposed to being made up by a human. I think it's fairly obvious via Occam's Razor, but still, they're not claiming the quotes could be legit.

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

#223

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bombcar wrote: post #191
usefulposter wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible. When Ars pull an article and its comments, they wipe the public XenForo forum thread too, but Scott's post there was archived. Username scottshambaugh: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213211721/https://arstechni... >Scott Shambaugh here. None of the quotes you attribute to me in the second half of the article are accurate, and do not exist at the source you link. It appears that they themselves are AI ha…

This is just one of the reasons archiving is so important in the digital era; it's key to keeping people honest.

Yes, Wayback machine/archive.org is one of the best websites on the whole world wide web.

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

#224

Post by asddubs »

usefulposter wrote: post #181
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.

Incredible. When Ars pull an article and its comments, they wipe the public XenForo forum thread too, but Scott's post there was archived. Username scottshambaugh: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213211721/https://arstechni... >Scott Shambaugh here. None of the quotes you attribute to me in the second half of the article are accurate, and do not exist at the source you link. It appears that they themselves are AI ha…

I read the forum thread, and most people seem to be critical of ars. One person said scott is a bot, but this read to me as a joke about the situation

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

#225

Post by asddubs »

llbbdd wrote: post #77
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.

Honestly frustrating that Scott chose not to name and shame the authors. Liability is the only thing that's going to stop this kind of ugly shit.

I mean, he linked the archived article. You're one click away from the information if you really want to know.

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

#227

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

I really like that stance. I’m a big advocate of “Train by do.” It’s basically the story of my career.

And in the next paragraph, they mention a problem that I often need to manually mitigate, when using LLM-supplied software: it was sort of a “quick fix,” that may not have aged well.

The Ars Technica thing is probably going to cause them a lot of damage, and make big ripples. That’s pretty shocking, to me.

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

#229

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
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.

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…

I’ve been saying the same kind of thing (and I have been far from alone), for years, about dependaholism.

Nothing new here, in software. What is new, is that AI is allowing dependency hell to be experienced by many other vocations.

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