Our newsroom AI policy

Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising.

This in particular dawned on me when asking Claude for instructions in taking apart my dryer. There was literally only one webpage on the internet left with instructions for my particular dryer - the page was more or less unusable with rotten links and riddled with adware. Claude did it's best but filled in the missing diagrams with hallucinations.

I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.

It might not be a lot of money, but it would certainly be more than the pitiful ad revenue you get from posting content online right now. And if I want to upload corrected instructions for repairing this dryer I would have reason to.

This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired.

I have felt very ethically uneasy about this because the person was ill, and I emailed the Ars editorial team directly to express concern re labour conditions, and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes.

Of course it is the journalist's responsibility: when you have a job you do your job by policy (I wonder if this policy existed in writing at the time of the firing?) plus, it is part of the job to be accurate. But I am also a firm believer in responsibility being greater at higher levels. This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team.

> Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets.

If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention.

You cannot permit your employees to use LLMs in this manner and then tell them it's entirely their fault when it makes mistakes, because you gave them permission to use something that will make mistakes 100% without fail. My takeaway from this is to never trust anything that Ars reports because their policy is to rely on plausible generated fictional research and their solution to getting caught is to fire employees rather than taking accountability for doing actual research.

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Edit: Two replies have found complaint with the fact that I didn't quote the following sentence, so here you go:

> Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.

If I wasn't clear, I consider this to be part of what makes the policy self-contradictory. In my eyes, this is equivalent to providing all of your employees with a flamethrower, and then saying they bear all responsibility for the fires they start. "Hey, don't blame us for giving them flamethrowers, it's company policy not to burn everything to the ground!". Rather than firing the flamethrower-wielding employees when the inevitable burning happens, maybe don't give them flamethrowers.

As opposed to what? This is a little facetious, but what could it possibly mean to have creative direction and editorial judgement without human involvement?

Presumably we're talking about image generated by a diffusion model or something, but further, an image which is generated without being edited by any human. The prompt used to generate the image isn't written by a human, and it can't really be based on the contents of the (human authored and edited) article either. No human may select the service or model used, and once generated the image is published sight unseen without being reviewed by any human.

If some kind of agentic AI does any of these things it is one which appears ex nihilo, spontaneously appearing without being created or directed by any human.