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Our newsroom AI policy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#91

Post by ihuman »

madeofpalk wrote: post #90
madamelic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what their point is is that if you give people a "extract-needle-from-haystack" machine and then tell them they have to manually find where in the haystack the needle was, it defeats the purpose of having the machine. With that said, a good RAG solution would come with metadata to point to where it was sourced from.

when you use the extract-needle-from-haystack machine, verify that it actually extracted a needle. that's much easier than manually extracting the needle yourself

Another interpretation is if you have multiple haystacks, and the machine tells you which haystack likely has a needle in it. You still need to extract the needle yourself,

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#92

Post by Auracle »

troyvit wrote: post #75
legitster wrote: post #4

AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. 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 askin…

> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.

“Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-...

That’s not that far off from 80%.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#93

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > 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 r…

> permit

I suspect that it's more like "ordered."

Many companies are now requiring staff to use AI.

Of course, if the employee screws up, then The Secretary Will Disavow Any Knowledge of Your Activities.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#94

Post by totetsu »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > 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 r…

Is this a case of Moral crumple zones? where "responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#95

Post by TremendousJudge »

Auracle wrote: post #92
troyvit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.

“Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-... That’s not that far off from 80%.

It's not evenly distributed. Big labels get much better payouts per listen than independent artists

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#96

Post by palmotea »

intended wrote: post #87
palmotea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content.... > Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to d…

At this point, it feels like most technology will be used in favor of people with power, and not in a democratizing manner. I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.

> I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.

What do you mean by that? It seems inherent to the technology under capitalism: it allows a flood of slop and anything public and valuable will be plundered, so the incentive is to make valuable stuff exclusive and elite.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#97

Post by Edman274 »

dspillett wrote: post #42
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > 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 r…

> 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. Yes you can. The same way Wikipedia (or, way back when, a paper encyclopedia) can be used for research but you have to verify everything with other sources because it is known there are errors and…

> Yes you can. The same way Wikipedia (or, way back when, a paper encyclopedia) can be used for research but you have to verify everything with other sources because it is known there are errors and deficiencies in such sources.

I think that if Wikipedia had no recommendations on good sources for their own articles and did not ever ban sources, companies would not be so sanguine about letting people use Wikipedia. There's an entire internal process associated with evaluating sources, and the expectation when using Wikipedia is that nothing written in an article is going to be sourced from the Daily Mail or Conservapedia, as an example. Also, I do think that there are companies that do have policies against talking to known liars. Given the Wikipedia bans sources and news agencies ban human sources once they've been shown to be unreliable, I don't think it's insane to then have such companies or agencies say that AI shouldn't be used because it's been shown to be unreliable. Obviously there's a balancing act of utility versus accuracy, and Ars has (probably incorrectly) decided that the utility of AI outweighs its inaccuracies.

What is frustrating is that AI cannot have a higher accuracy than the median reporter, given a little more time. AI is trained on all digitizable text, including falsehoods and inaccuracies by laypeople. Humans can look up digitizable text using search engines, too. An AI can't follow up on leads or ask anyone questions. There's no world in which synthesizing available data from digitized sources alone ends up with more accurate data than a human with a search engine and the ability to make a phone call. So allowing LLM use at all is a direct admission that seeking out the "truth" is not an important goal because it could never actually improve accuracy and could only worsen it through hallucinated, probable reporting. It's one thing when companies say that they're committed to truth and then secretly their most important overriding concern is their bottom line - it's quite another thing when a company directly says that the bottom line is their most important concern. Imagine the emperor walking through the parade, nude, saying "So what if I am nude? What are you going to do about it?"

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#98

Post by duped »

These statements seem to be in contradiction

> The short version: Ars Technica is written by humans. AI doesn’t write our stories, generate our images, or put words in anyone’s mouth.

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material

Something that bothers me is that people who value their organic output (Ars is written word, obviously they care more about the writing than the thumbnails) seem to treat their work as more deserving of human generation than the associated work. Which seems fine on its face, but the problem is that it's devaluing the marketplace for original human content.

Paying people to create original media even when it's not the primary output of your media organization is important to keeping the craft alive in general.

I see this all the time locally, where arts organizations will use generative AI for everything but their own product, not realizing that the very use of it at all is destroying art.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#99

Post by cat_plus_plus »

My news reading AI policy - I will use whatever source for news, AI or human, that gives me the best news. A lot of times it's human, like I appreciate diverse human comments on ycombinator. CNN used to have comments threads on articles and then gave that up because some comments were spicy, so I stopped reading. I don't remember the last time I went to arstechnica, I guess because they didn't standout compared to just asking Grok what's new in tech or browsing Reddit. If they could have used more AI to make their site more interesting, they should have.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#100

Post by empath75 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #68

AI for writing feels like such a stupid idea. When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard. If you make an LLM generate the text, and you still bear responsibility for whether it's correct or not, you haven't actually reduced the amount of work you have to do at all because now instead of "thinking -> writing" you need "reading -> thinking -> rewriting." "Reading…

> When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard.

At least for technical writing at work (internal docs for example), i typically have an extended back and forth conversation with claude refining my ideas, then I have it sketch out the outline which saves _so much time_. Then all I have to do is fix what it got wrong or add things that it missed.

I am not doing this as a creative expression that I find personal fulfillment in, I am doing it to check off a box on a jira issue.

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