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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#171

Post by nl »

sneak wrote: post #93
nl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your hit comment any better than the AI's initial post? It lacked the context supplied later by Scott. Your's also lacks context and calls for much higher stake consequences.

My comment reports only facts and a few of my personal opinions on professional conduct in journalism. I think you and I have a fundamental divergence on the definition of the term “hit comment”. Mine does not remotely qualify. Telling the truth about someone isn’t a “hit” unless you are intentionally misrepresenting the state of affairs. I’m simply reposting accurate and direct information that is already public and…

> I’m simply reposting accurate and direct information that is already public and already highlighted by TFA.

No you aren't. To quote:

> There ought to be social consequences for using machines to mindlessly and recklessly libel people.

Ars didn't libel anyone. They misquoted with manufactured quotes, but the quotes weren't libelous in anyway because they weren't harmful to his reputation.

Indeed, you are closer to libel than they are.

For example, if these quotes were added during some automated editing processes by Ars rather than the authors themselves then your statement is both harmful to their reputation and false.

> These people should never publish for a professional outlet like Ars ever again. Publishing entirely hallucinated quotes without fact checking is a fireable offense in my book.

That's going perilously close to calling for them to be sacked over something which I think everyone would acknowledge is a mistake.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#172

Post by hxugufjfjf »

rkomorn wrote: post #161
boothby wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to a day when the internet is so uniformly fraudulent that we can set it aside and return to the physical plane.

I don't know if I look forward to it, myself, but yeah: I can imagine a future where in person interactions become preferred again because at least you trust the other person is human. Until that also stops being true, I guess.

There's a fracking cylon on Discovery!

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#173

Post by llbbdd »

rectang wrote: post #118
llbbdd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly frustrating that Scott chose not to name and shame the authors. Liability is the only thing that's going to stop this kind of ugly shit.

There is no need to rush to judgment on the internet instant-gratification timescale. If consequences are coming for journalist or publication, they are inevitable. We’ll know more in only a couple days — how about we wait that long before administering punishment?

It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you.

EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for typos, or maligned sources. Nobody typed these quotes out and went "oops, that's not what Scott said". Benj Edwards or Kyle Orland pulled the lever on the bullshit slot machine and attacked someone's integrity with the result.

"In the past, though, the threat of anonymous drive-by character assassination at least required a human to be behind the attack. Now, the potential exists for AI-generated invective to infect your online footprint."

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#174

Post by llbbdd »

_HMCB_ wrote: post #155
sphars wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aurich Lawson (creative director at Ars) posted a comment[0] in response to a thread about what happened, the article has been pulled and they'll follow-up next week. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

It’s funny they say the article “may have” run afoul of their journalistic standards. May have is carrying a lot of weight there.

The article "may have" drawn too much attention to how little they care.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#175

Post by llbbdd »

mermerico wrote: post #31

Looks like Ars is doing an investigation and will give an update on Tuesday https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

Lmao an investigation. They're riding it out over a long weekend, at which point it won't be at the top of this site, where all their critical traffic comes from, so they can keep planting turds at the top of Google News for everyone else.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#177

Post by hysan »

Another fascinating thing that the Reddit thread discussing the original PR pointed out is that whoever owns that AI account opened another PR (same commits) and later posted this comment: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...

> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?

It’s a bit wild to me that people are siding with the AI agent / whoever is commanding it. Combined with the LLM hallucinated reporting and all the discussion this has spawned, I think this is making out to be a great case study on the social impact of LLM tooling.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#178

Post by pmontra »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #131
epistasis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information. Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.…

TBF even journalists who interview people for real and take notes routinely quite them saying things they didn't say. The LLMs make it worse, but it's hardly surprising behaviour from them

I knew first hand about a couple of news in my life. Both were reported quite incorrectly. That was well before LLMs. I assume that every news is quite inaccurate, so I read/hear them to get the general gist of what happened, then I research the details if I care about them.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#179

Post by anonymous908213 »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…

> When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

I would expect there is literally zero overlap between the "professionals"[1] who say "don't look at the code" and the ones criticising the "journalists"[2]. The former group tend to be maximalists and would likely cheer on the usage of LLMs to replace the work of the latter group, consequences be damned.

[1] The people that say this are not professional software developers, by the way. I still have not seen a single case of any vibe coder who makes useful software suitable for deployment at scale. If they make money, it is by grifting and acting as an "AI influencer", for instance Yegge shilling his memecoin for hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was rugpulled.

[2] Somebody who prompts an LLM to produce an article and does not even so much as fact-check the quotations it produces can clearly not be described as a journalist, either.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#180

Post by pmontra »

netsharc wrote: post #46
giobox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for. The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened. I loved Ars in the early years…

Probably "one bad apple", soon to be fired, tarred and feathered...

Scapegoats are scapegoats but in every organization the problems are ultimately caused by their leaders. It's what they request or what they fail to request and what they lack to control.
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