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Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

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Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#121

Post by IshKebab »

jrmg wrote: post #116
AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

Is it normal/expected for a news organization to publish that they fired someone? I’m inclined to take the ‘don’t comment on personnel matters’ at face value. They did report on the article quote sourcing debacle at the time - perhaps not as quickly as some would’ve liked, but within a couple of days.

The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even). Here's an example:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo

I think they're an outlier, but still I was disappointed by Ars's response. They deleted the article and didn't detail what was wrong with it at all. Felt like a cover-up.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#122

Post by watwut »

jcgrillo wrote: post #111
lynx97 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between an error and totally misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no sympathy for journalists getting caught producing hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and should always result in that person being fired.

Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let that shit through code review, and a customer impacting outage results, that should be instant termination. But it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to be held "blameless" right?

Joirnalist job was not to review ai-slop. That is rather crucial difference.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#123

Post by bayindirh »

jrmg wrote: post #116
AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

Is it normal/expected for a news organization to publish that they fired someone? I’m inclined to take the ‘don’t comment on personnel matters’ at face value. They did report on the article quote sourcing debacle at the time - perhaps not as quickly as some would’ve liked, but within a couple of days.

Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore.

It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened.

I also want to note that, this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#124

Post by dang »

swyx wrote: post #97
dang wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! and indeed - here's the sequence (in the usual reverse order). If there are missing threads we can add them... An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145 - Feb 2026 (501 comments) OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments) An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fal…

also how the heck do you pull all these related things, do you have a semantic/agentic search bot by now or is this all just from your head?

It should be a semantic search bot and maybe will be in the future, but for now I rely on the method described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546715 and the links back from there.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#125

Post by raincole »

ajkjk wrote: post #88
raincole wrote: post #39

I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years. I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.

I know people love to hate on the AI overviews, and I'm a person who generally hates both google and AI. But--I see them as basically good and ideal. After all most of the time I am googling something like trivial, like a simple fact. And for the last decade when I have to click into sites for the information it's some SEO spam-ridden garbage site. So I am very glad to not have to interact with those anymore. Of cour…

> I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

No one remembers when AI Overview gets the answer right (it's expected to do so after all) but everyone has their favorite examples of "oh stupid AI."

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#126

Post by Barbing »

autoexec wrote: post #99
DetroitThrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that. I feel bad for the guy, but there's just no way I can imagine much better safeguards other than editors paying more close attention to referencing sources, and hiring more reliable people.

> It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that. More than that, as a reporter on AI he should have been fully aware that AI frequently bullshits and lies. He should have known it was not reliable and that its output needs to be carefully verified by a human if you care at all about the accuracy or quality of what it gives you. His excuse that this…

>his whole job

Possibly akin to a roofer taking a shortcut up there, then taking a spill? You knew better but unfortunately let the fact that you could probably get away with it with zero impact decide for you.

IIRC hallucinations were essentially kicked off initially by user error, or rather… let’s say at least: a journalist using the best available technologies should have been able to reduce the chance of this big of an issue to near zero, even with language models in the loop & without human review.

(e.g. imagine Karpathy’s llm-council with extra harnessing/scripting, so even MORE expensive, but still. Or some RegEx!)

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#127

Post by dang »

neya wrote: post #93
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? I just had to ask you this in a different context. You may not owe your least favorite publications better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I just had to ask you this in a different context. Sorry, I just searched my comment history, maybe I missed it? Was it recent?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223723

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#128

Post by vasco »

AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

They're a random tech blog, the kind of website that is peak time waste slop, why would they have any standards? Even the new york times and the Washington post put up wrong things all the time without corrections. People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth. They are there to sell ads, the same way a youtube video of a guy eating too much food in front of a camera is.

Journalism has devolved into content creation in the literal sense of the word, they are just there to put something inside the div with the id "content", to justify the ads around it.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#129

Post by suzzer99 »

dang wrote: post #124
swyx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also how the heck do you pull all these related things, do you have a semantic/agentic search bot by now or is this all just from your head?

It should be a semantic search bot and maybe will be in the future, but for now I rely on the method described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546715 and the links back from there.

> It should be a semantic search bot and maybe will be in the future

No. We only get the dystopian AI features, not the useful ones.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#130

Post by Barbing »

epistasis wrote: post #41
areoform wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know how to say no.

I know a lot of people that don't get through their email every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time, with the volume of communication required by daily work.

Their repeat emailers might win eventually!

Passing on some life advice to anyone who’d benefit, people are busy. Maybe they didn’t respond because you’re annoying?… no no, feel it out and text again a while later. Give them another shot, get to the top of their inbox or messages again.

After someone told me that I realized it’s true!

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