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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

#481

Post by lukeschlather »

cubefox wrote: post #463
lukeschlather wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?

Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?

That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"

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

#482

Post by amarant »

metabagel wrote: post #469
amarant wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon. I think death threats are a bit too far. But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity. A mouth piece would be lauding…

Musk illegally impounded funds resulting in about 800,000 deaths a year for the foreseeable future. It does tend to make one angry.

I'm not saying he's a great guy, I'm saying death threats are a bridge too far, especially for professional journalists.

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

#483

Post by mbreese »

x0x0 wrote: post #457
mbreese wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fact that they one of the last places surviving from that generation of the Internet says a lot. The Condé Nast acquisition may have been a tragedy, but they managed to survive for this long. They’ve been continuously publishing online for about 30 years. It’s honestly amazing that they’ve managed to last this long. Yes, it’s very different than it was back in the day. You don’t see 20+ page reviews of op…

Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it. You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.

ArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like.

Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.

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

#484

Post by GaggiX »

lich_king wrote: post #479
cubefox wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about. 1: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini...

For what it's worth, both the article you're linking to and the one this story is about are immediately flagged by AI text checkers as LLM-generated. These tools are not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong.

>These tools are not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong.

Based on what in particular? The only time I have used them is to have a laugh.

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

#485

Post by lich_king »

GaggiX wrote: post #484
lich_king wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, both the article you're linking to and the one this story is about are immediately flagged by AI text checkers as LLM-generated. These tools are not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong.

>These tools are not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong. Based on what in particular? The only time I have used them is to have a laugh.

Based on experience, including a good number of experiments I've done with known-LLM output and contemporary, known-human text. Try them for real and be surprised. Some of the good, state-of-the-art tools include originality.ai and Pangram.

A lot of people on HN have preconceived notions here based on stories they read about someone being unfairly accused of plagiarism or people deliberately triggering failure modes in these programs, and that's basically like dismissing the potential of LLMs because you read they suggested putting glue on a pizza once.

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

#486

Post by mpaepper »

gertrunde wrote: post #371

Current response from one of the more senior Ars folk: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... (Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)

It says 24y in his profile - is that really the more senior at Ars?

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

#487

Post by joquarky »

skydhash wrote: post #244
ffsm8 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point. And that's ignoring that your statement technically isn't even true, because the engineers actually working in such fields are very few (i.e. designing bridges, airplanes etc). The majority of them design products where safety isn't nearly as high stakes as that... And they fre…

> You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests though, which was my point. Are you sure? Simulators and prototypes abound. By the time you’re building the real, it’s more like rehearsal and solving a fe problems instead of every intricacy in the formula.

Are you describing the ideal that they should be doing, or are you describing what you have observed actually happens in practice?

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

#488

Post by dotancohen »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #431
lokar wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prefer a "both sides" style of political coverage? At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?

I like this aphorism someone once stated on bothsides-ism: When an arson burns down your home you don't pause to consider their side of the situation. Standing up to a bully doesn't mean the bully is being treated unfairly. They're just not accustomed to pushback on their BS and quickly don the caul of victimhood whenever their position is exposed.

[flagged]

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

#489

Post by whyenot »

bsimpson wrote: post #372
dylan604 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle. It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.

Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy. It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.

I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice.

Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliate links. Even organizations with very high ethical standards like Consumer Reports use them now. At least CR still gets most of its income from subscriptions and memberships. I guess that's something.

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

#490

Post by bombcar »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #461
dotancohen wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject. It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously cons…

That’s interesting to me because my trust in Consumer Reports was heavily eroded when I read a review on computer printers that was basically all wrong and wondered if any of there other reviews could possibly be trusted.

Consumer reports is really good at following their methodology, but you really need to read and understand their methodology, because it's often completely worthless.

A perfect example is toilets - I don't care at all how well a toilet flushes golfballs, because I never flush golfballs.

https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm

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