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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

#131

Post by abustamam »

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.

Very few people email me except for endless newsletters that I accidentally signed up for. I try to un sub to a few every day but it seems never ending.

In the event that you actually do end up emailing me, it's contingent on me actually checking my personal email, which I never do when I'm not working, and only sometimes do during work hours.

If it's you asking me a favor that I'm not in the mental space for, I'll mark the message unread as a reminder to get to it later.

Maybe I just have weird email habits, but I can get away with this because email is not a heavy part of my job.

That being said, one guy was pitching me on something several times a month for several months. I just recently responded to him and apologized because of x y z. He said don't worry and we had a fruitful conversation later.

So, follow through is important!

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

#132

Post by suzzer99 »

palmotea wrote: post #90
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 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. It says things I know to be false fairly regularly. I don't keep a log or anything, but it's left an impression that it's far from reliable.

Today I searched something and almost pasted the output into an internet forum discussion I was having. But I decided to check the wikipedia source just to make sure. The AI summary was not quoted directly from wikipedia, and it got some major aspects wrong in its summary. Lesson learned.

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

#133

Post by nerdsniper »

bayindirh wrote: post #123
jrmg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to.

They never really announced Peter Bright leaving ArsTechnica either though. At least not until much much later.

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

#134

Post by abustamam »

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.

The ai summary has been wrong so many times for me. Not that I ever trusted it anyway.

I think content sites will need to rely on supporters (ala patreon or substack). It's shitty but it's what the internet has come to

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

#135

Post by Barbing »

Gigachad wrote: post #114
jrmg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see the fall in real time - half the sources are also dubious AI slop now and that number’s only growing :-/

At work the conversation is that simultaneously everyone is using LLMs now, yet we receive virtually no traffic through them. The LLMs scrape our data, provide an answer to the user, and we see nothing from it.

How often are they scraping?

Also generally wondering… Do labs view scraping as legally safer than trying to cache the Internet? I figure it’s easy to mark certain content as all but evergreen (can do a quick secondary check for possible new news).

Maybe caching everything is too expensive?

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

#136

Post by maccard »

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.

Really? I’ve noticed that the AI overview is full of glaring issues repeatedly. It’s akin to trusting the first Reddit post that is found by Google.

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

#137

Post by bayindirh »

nerdsniper wrote: post #133
bayindirh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to. They never really announced Peter Bright leaving ArsTechnica either though. At least not until much much later.

That was a criminal case, though. The court process may have prevented them from talking about it to keep things fair.

I'm not a US citizen and IANAL, so YMMV.

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

#138

Post by carabiner »

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…

It's cuz Ars's roots are in being video game bloggers and graphics card reviewers, not legitimate journalists. They don't have a notion of professionalism or journalistic duty, only virality and juicy takes.

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

#139

Post by lukan »

vasco wrote: post #128
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…

"People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth."

You just changed the meaning of journalist. Now sure, the job of some journalists could be better described as ad sellers, but I rather call those like that and restrict the original term to actual journalists who actually care about truth. Because they still exist.

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

#140

Post by kergonath »

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…

Ars never commented about firing staff before, and it happened on several occasions. You get the occasional article when someone joins, never when someone leaves. They should have published another article after all this, but I would not expect them to comment about staff.
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