Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our newsroom AI policy

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#121

Post by booleandilemma »

Drivel. Either forbid it from the newsroom entirely or call yourself what you are: a slop shop.

Newspapers have existed for hundreds of years without AI. They don't need it now. Employ humans. Human journalists. Human editors.

I suppose I'll take a moment to plug my HN userscript "HN Blacklist": https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427213-hn-blacklist

If you want to not see articles from Ars Technica on HN simply install the userscript and add:

  source:arstechnica.com

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#122

Post by butlike »

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 an artist, you don't want this. I promise you you don't want this.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#123

Post by butlike »

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.

Tech has never been about democratization. Put elsewise: he who have the trebuchet, has thine castle.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#124

Post by brabel »

intended wrote: post #102
palmotea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mean that > inherent to the technology Vs > inherent to the technology under capitalism The TLDR of my point is going to be that wealth concentration and information pollution sets up economies that don’t work for us in a manner that is healthy for us.

We need to find a way to incentivize progress that does not involve purely personal wealth.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#125

Post by Terr_ »

totetsu wrote: post #94
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...

Related concept: Unaccountability machines [0] where the system (electronic or organizational) mainly exists to make things nobody's fault.

There's Discworld bit [1] that often comes to mind for me, where the protagonist is reading a press-release by a corporate communications monopoly

> The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and “were to be regretted.”

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...

[1] Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#127

Post by alsetmusic »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #116
halhen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting listen https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ about money laundering and spam in streaming services

I find that very believable. My completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that OnlyFans is a money-laundering and dragnet-style-blackmail campaign for unlawful mass surveillance. I can’t imagine a normal or even abnormal person paying content makers, but I could imagine contractors and NGOs smurfing payments.

I have a friend who pays (or at least paid) for cam shows. I don't understand it either because there's so much free content, but then you have cases like the guy who murdered his parents because he'd sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to a cam performer who he thought he was in love with.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Amato

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#128

Post by jasonlotito »

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…

> If I wasn't clear, I consider this to be part of what makes the policy self-contradictory.

Yeah, it's not. And this is a bad take. Adults can easily do this. That you consider this to be burning everything to the ground says more about you than anything.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#129

Post by jasonlotito »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #106
dspillett wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The same way Wikipedia can be used for research Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of disinformation in human history. No journalist should ever have been using it for research. At best it's a fun project for satisfying people's idle curiosity where the truth of what they read doesn't really matter, but if your job is to report factual information, reading Wikipedia is doing a disservice to yourself and…

> Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of disinformation in human history. No journalist should ever have been using it for research.

Look up what a bibliography and how it's used.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#130

Post by jasonlotito »

dheatov wrote: post #48

AI policy with AI usage is always difficult to write/read. Lengthy, frontloaded with excuses, values, and big words, followed by more words to fill the gap between sliced up ugly truth. AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it.

> AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it.

That's only valid if they share all the apps, services, and hardware they use to verify no AI usage.

Post reply on HN