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Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

theguardian.com

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Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#41

Post by tobr »

Interesting to note how similar this seems to what happened with Benj Edwards at Ars Technica. AI was used to extract or summarize information, and quotes found in the summary were then used as source material for the final writing and never double checked against the actual source.

I’ve run into a similar problem myself - working with a big transcript, I asked an AI to pull out passages that related to a certain topic, and only because of oddities in the timestamps extracted did I realize that most of the quotes did not exist in the source at all.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#42

Post by Hendrikto »

ashwinnair99 wrote: post #19

The tool didn't fail here, the person did. An experienced journalist should know better. Editorial review exists for exactly this reason, if you skip it, this is what happens.

> The tool didn't fail here, the person did

Both failed.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#43

Post by andrewflnr »

sigseg1v wrote: post #25
camillomiller wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CTO sent me a message that opened with: “Here’s a friendly message that will perfectly convey what you want to say”. A double PhD friend says she has to talk to chatGPT for all sort of advice and can’t feel safe not doing it, “because you know I’m single and don’t have a companion to spitball my ideas”. She let chatGPT decide which way to take to get to a certain island, and she got stranded because the suggested s…

How is the getting stranded example different than asking on a travel forum how to get somewhere, and an active and well intentioned user that isn't familiar with your area of travel answers, gives you wrong instructions, and you get lost?

The key missing step is where the traveler exercises critical thinking and checks the advice they get. Some people seem to turn that off for LLMs.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#44

Post by crop_rotation »

andrewflnr wrote: post #37
crop_rotation wrote: post #23

HN is full of people saying ABCD should know better and honestly I thought the same, but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly. People get defensive when I point out out to them that ChatGPT will make things up and it is widely know, and some even tell me it is the fault of "tech people"…

Your friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.

Yes and the world should be utopia and everyone should be happy and we all wish for world peace and yada yada yada. What you are saying is a vision of ideal world as it should be, but doesn't help anyone understand the real world problems.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#45

Post by andrewflnr »

crop_rotation wrote: post #44
andrewflnr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.

Yes and the world should be utopia and everyone should be happy and we all wish for world peace and yada yada yada. What you are saying is a vision of ideal world as it should be, but doesn't help anyone understand the real world problems.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable. That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#46

Post by ath3nd »

crop_rotation wrote: post #44
andrewflnr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.

Yes and the world should be utopia and everyone should be happy and we all wish for world peace and yada yada yada. What you are saying is a vision of ideal world as it should be, but doesn't help anyone understand the real world problems.

[dead]

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#47

Post by hvb2 »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #40
hvb2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his apology was actually written in Dutch so this might be a translation that was automated? Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peter-vandermeersch-a4381b30_...

It is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact. Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.” English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.” I’d say the only difference is the em dash. Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.

I'm not disagreeing it's a bad translation. Just saying that it's not the source

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#48

Post by friedtofu »

crop_rotation wrote: post #23

HN is full of people saying ABCD should know better and honestly I thought the same, but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly. People get defensive when I point out out to them that ChatGPT will make things up and it is widely know, and some even tell me it is the fault of "tech people"…

I think this is an issue with anyone who relies on any LLMs. But yeah I agree and have had similar issues where someone will get defensive because they just don't want to admit they(the LLM's response) were wrong. It's hard to tell someone in a "nice/nonchalant" way:

"It's fine, the LLM just lied to you, but hallucinations and making claims based off of assumptions is just something they do and always have done!"

People don't like to feel dumb, and they don't want to feel betrayed by the same tool that gave them incredible factually correct results that one time only to give them complete and utter bullshit(that sounded legitimate) another time.

Also, yeah it feels like its everywhere these days and isn't showing any signs of slowing down(visited my parents and my dads using siri to ask chatgpt stuff now - URGHHHH) and I really hope we're both wrong

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#49

Post by hvb2 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #7

"Journalism" over here seems to have died a long time ago. Most if not all of the former "quality newspapers" unfortunately seem to have devolved into what could be more accurately described as "pro regime activist blogs".

If by "over here" you mean the US, that sounds about right. Can be summed up succinctly into "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#50

Post by bryanrasmussen »

andrewflnr wrote: post #45
crop_rotation wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the world should be utopia and everyone should be happy and we all wish for world peace and yada yada yada. What you are saying is a vision of ideal world as it should be, but doesn't help anyone understand the real world problems.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable . That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

yes but the electrical socket in question is a fairly new-fangled one, who doesn't want to fork-test it a bit.
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