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Our newsroom AI policy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#131

Post by jasonlotito »

riffraff wrote: post #18

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven. How is this different from anyone else publishing AI slop images on their blog? Those people also direct the AI through prompting and evaluate the results. I mean, use AI images, so long as they are not crap, but why keep up this charade of "we're authoring the slop".

They explicitly call out what they mean by this in the comments. In this case, they are calling out tools that have been around for a long time that some would consider AI rather than just ML. What specifically from the examples do you disagree with?

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#132

Post by jasonlotito »

duped wrote: post #98

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 thumbnai…

Since they provided examples of this in the comments, what specifically are you opposed to?

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#133

Post by amarant »

alsetmusic wrote: post #127
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And of course it's a Florida Man. There's got to be something in the water over there

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#134

Post by LeCompteSftware »

jasonlotito wrote: post #130
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.

Kind of incredible that this comic was published 10 years ago and people still use the same dumb arguments online: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Any honest reader knows "we don't use AI" means "we don't use LLMs to generate content." It does not mean "all the software we use is AI-free" and it certainly doesn't mean "we don't use ML."

Comments like yours are only meant to muddy the waters and mislead people. There is nothing compelling about Mister Gotcha. It is pure bad faith. I am so sick of it.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#135

Post by the_biot »

When that slop article incident happened, I thought their reaction to it was MUCH too late -- they should have fired the journalist in question immediately, and come out hard against slop writing. I stopped reading Ars Technica because of it, and will not follow links to their site.

Now that they've finally come out with an official policy, I see I was right.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#136

Post by ares623 »

Loughla wrote: post #54
ares623 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically the part where engineers get paid the same way as artists on Spotify.

So a handful will make a buttload but the vast majority won't make enough to pay rent?

Doesn't sound nice if it happens to us does it?

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#138

Post by Barrin92 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #128
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.

>Adults can easily do this.

no they can't, as showcased by the countless of people who don't. This isn't how human beings work. If you give someone a tool that facilitates taking mental shortcuts they will abuse it.

You put a code generation tool or even just stackoverflow in front of programmers, they will mindlessly copy-paste. You put the slop generator in front of journalists, they'll write slop. You put the tasty snack and the healthy snack at equal distance in front of someone, guess what they'll eat.

The vast majority of people will pick laziness and speed over correctness, always have. So we need tools that if anything slow down work and encourage thinking, not the opposite. You want a better programmer you hand them a debugger and not a chatbot because then they'll be forced to think.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#139

Post by ymolodtsov »

pjc50 wrote: post #53
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. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse , because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content…

> So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? Such an utter fantasy.

The only way payments go to AI music if people would actually listened to it.

Of course there's some fraud going on. Any financial system has it. It's still minimal and that's precisely why you know of such cases.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#140

Post by ymolodtsov »

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…

I've never seen a summarizing mistake from any modern LLM. What are you even talking about?

LLMs hallucinate when they don't have enough context. Not when they're just cutting down the message in their context.

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