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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

#251

Post by the_biot »

kethinov wrote: post #245
everdrive wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.

The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be d…

They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.

Phoronix comes to mind.

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

#252

Post by embedding-shape »

everdrive wrote: post #241
lukan wrote: post #238

The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?

Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.

> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising

Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?

Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.

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

#253

Post by vor_ »

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…

The comment calling him a bot is sarcasm.

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

#254

Post by Kwpolska »

zahlman wrote: post #32
basketbla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably pretty big difference in system prompt from using the apps vs hitting the api, not that that’s necessarily what’s happening here. + I think openclaw supports other models / its open source and it would be pretty easy to fork and add a new model provider.

Why wouldn't the system prompt be controlled on the server side of the API? I agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47010577 ; I think results like this more likely come from "roleplaying" (lightweight jailbreaking).

The websites and apps probably have a system prompt that tells them to be more cautious with stuff like this, so that AIs look more credible to the general public. APIs might not.

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

#255

Post by Kwpolska »

dylan604 wrote: post #30
nicole_express wrote: post #12

Extremely shameful of Ars Technica; I used to consider them a decent news source and my estimation of them has gone down quite a bit.

At this point, any site that is posting multiple articles within a day is pretty safe to assume it is LLM content. The sites with actual journalists will have a much lower post count per day. There's no way a site staffed by intern level people writing that much content had time to investigate and write with editorial revisions. It's all first to post, details be damned.

You realise that those sites posted multiple articles per day ten years ago, long before LLMs were invented?

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

#256

Post by lapcat »

embedding-shape wrote: post #250
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.

> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?

The personal blogs of experts.

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

#257

Post by bloggie »

embedding-shape wrote: post #250
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.

techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.

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

#258

Post by vor_ »

Lerc wrote: post #169
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.

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?

Another red flag is that the article used repetitive phrases in an AI-like way:

"...it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary."

followed later on by

"[It] illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place."

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

#259

Post by rfc2324 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #250
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.

https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.

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

#260

Post by DonHopkins »

tempestn wrote: post #222
DonHopkins wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

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