181–190 of 223 posts
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How do you unintentionally use an AI to help you write an article?
A fever can cause altered mental states, confusion, etc. It's not surprising that someone suffering from one would act out of character.
Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.
I'm happy that they fixed it, checked for any similar errors, and promised that they would improve their processes to try to prevent it from happening again. This is pretty much what I expect when an organization makes a mistake. Many organizations don't do as well.
Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.
Former technology journalist here. If you want to experiment with reported news using untested tools that have known quality problems, do it in a strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted. Senior editor(s) need to be in the loop. Start with something easier, not controversial or high-profile articles. One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so…
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Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?
Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.
What are they changing to prevent this from happening in the future? Why was the use of LLMs not disclosed in the original article? Do they host any other articles covertly generated by LLMs? As far as I can tell, the pulled article had no obvious tells and was caught only because the quotes were entirely made up. Surely it's not the only one, though?
Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).
Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
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Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.
> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the…
And that might be a semi-justifiable stance if dealing with a human.
One of the many problems with our good friends the magic robots is that they don't just do incorrect stuff, they do _weird_ incorrect stuff, that a human would be unlikely to do, so it can fly under the radar.
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I'll admit that at least looks consistent with extreme carelessness rather than lying. I don't find it terribly convincing, though. I find it a suspiciously long chain of excuses perfectly calibrated to excuse the events. The description gets vague right at the critical point where AI output gets laundered into journalistic output, and the part about the tool being strictly to gather "verbatim source material" sounds…
Well I appreciate you taking the time to respond and acknowledge the new evidence. I agree with the broad point that dishonesty can't be tolerated in a newsroom. And it's a "Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach" situation, the appearance of dishonesty is very bad regardless of the reality. And despite what Orland claims I do think there's blame to go around for not catching the mistake (assuming we accept his accoun…
Unlucky, sure, but not beyond the bounds of possibility. Also possible that one or both was actually flu or RSV or other non-COVID fever-inducing respiratory disease; people often just bucket them all under COVID these days (a bit like they used to with flu).
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
I don’t see how you could know that without more information. Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes. It might just be careless. Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.
He covers AI for Ars Technica. Like, if he doesn't know that chatbots make shit up...
FWIW I suspect that a lot of the problem here was that he was _working while he had a high fever_. This is a really bad idea.