Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.
I bet they’ll be taking a break from AI for a while.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
351–360 of 670 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.
I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.
I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That may be for the technology and science sections. But the politics section is clearly pushing an agenda with regard to the current US administration - even though it is an agenda many people online might agree with. That section is not global, it is US-centric, and it heavily favours the popular side of the issue.
i don't think these are as contradictory as you make them out to be
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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There is no goalpost moving here.
I read the article.
My claim is as it has always been. If we accept that the misquotes exist it does not follow that they were caused by hallucinations? To tell that we would still need additional evidence. The logical thing to ask would be; Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#355I 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…
> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge. Unfortunately, this is my impression as well. I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#356Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#357The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.
Also filtered out the following slop generators from my RSS feed, which significantly enhanced my reading experience: Jonathan M. Gitlin Ashley Belanger Jon Brodkin I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
> I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
Twenty years ago?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#358I 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…
It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That w…
That car looks so unhappy :|
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#359Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.
Blog post of the maintainer about the Ars Technica article and other related stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 (492 points | 14 hours ago | 254 comments)
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#360This is fascinating because Ars has probably _the most_ anti-AI readership of the tech publications. If the author did use AI to generate the story (or even help) their will be rioting for sure
The original story for those curious
https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...