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

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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 670 posts

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

#181

Post by usefulposter »

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.

Incredible. When Ars pull an article and its comments, they wipe the public XenForo forum thread too, but Scott's post there was archived. Username scottshambaugh:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260213211721/https://arstechni...

>Scott Shambaugh here. None of the quotes you attribute to me in the second half of the article are accurate, and do not exist at the source you link. It appears that they themselves are AI hallucinations. The irony here is fantastic.

Instead of cross-checking the fake quotes against the source material, some proud Ars Subscriptors proceed to defend Condé Nast by accusing Scott of being a bot and/or fake account.

EDIT: Page 2 of the forum thread is archived too. This poster spoke too soon:

>Obviously this is massive breach of trust if true and I will likely end my pro sub if this isnt handled well but to the credit of ARS, having this comment section at all is what allows something like this to surface. So kudos on keeping this chat around.

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

#182

Post by justinclift »

epistasis wrote: post #87
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.

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.…

> Their credibility was already building up ...

Don't you mean diminishing or disappearing instead of building up?

Building up sounds like the exact opposite of what I think you're meaning. ;)

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

#185

Post by Pay08 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #156
sho_hn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I don't subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't look at the code - it's a lot more plausible for devs because you do actually have ways to validate the code without looking at it. E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar. Same with backend implementations which hav…

If you tried this shit in a real engineering principle, you'd end up either homeless or in prison in very short order.

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

#186

Post by usefulposter »

sphars wrote: post #142
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.

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...

Just like in the original thread that was wiped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast.

All threads have since been locked:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

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

#187

Post by Pay08 »

Lerc wrote: post #169
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.

Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?

You could read the original blog post...

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

#188

Post by Marsymars »

pixl97 wrote: post #49
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a core part of the job and there’s simply no excuse for complacency.

The words on the page are just a medium to sell ads. If shit gets ad views then producing shit is part of the job... unless you're the one stepping up to cut the checks.

Ars also sells ad-free subscriptions.

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

#189

Post by krackers »

trollbridge wrote: post #2

I never thought matplotlib would be so exciting. It’s always been one of those things that is… just there, and you take it for granted.

There hasn't been this much drama since "jet" was replaced as a color scheme!

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

#190

Post by bombcar »

usefulposter wrote: post #186
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...

Just like in the original thread that was wiped ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384 ), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast. All threads have since been locked: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a... https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-t…

Ars Technika has fallen substantially from the heady era of Siracusa macOS reviews.
Post reply on HN