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

Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

futurism.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 409 posts

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

#181

Post by fp64 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #145
fp64 wrote: post #69

Sad state of things. He did it because he was sick? That's close to claiming his dog ate the original quotes so he had to make some up. Well, Ars Technica is already for quite some time on my ignore list, and this further solidifies its place there.

I think that there's a potential different story with this. He felt that he had no option but to do work, even though he was so sick that he failed at the job. What's up with that? How insecure and pressured is his employment? If it's not true then the error is on him. But it seems plausibly bad to me as an outside observer of US employment and healthcare customs. And the precarity of journalism nowadays. It is a sad…

Circumstances can help explain, but never excuse unethical behavior

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

#182

Post by cubefox »

senko wrote: post #173
DamnableNook wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Berger has a strong pro-Musk bias (having literally written a fawning book about him). To him, Musk can do no wrong, it seems. I also dislike Dan Goodin’s reporting. He tries to talk the talk, but nearly every article he writes has some tell that he doesn’t really understand the thing he’s reporting on. Which is fine if he was relying on third-party expertise and quoting that, but he tries to make it sound like…

Berger wrote 2 books about SpaceX (not Musk), and he definitely does not have a pro-Musk bias. He's is careful not to opine on Musk's other dealings, which is fair. As someone who wants to know more about SpaceX, I don't want to read yet more about Tesla, or Twitter, or Trump, or Epstein. Personally, one of the authors I most like to read on ArsTechnica (though he writes rarely nowadays). CarTechnica though .. yuck.…

I think it's pretty widely agreed in the space flight community that Eric Berger is currently the best space flight reporter in the world. He has lots of insider sources. Several times he correctly predicted things years in advance. Most recently the Artemis III change to a LEO mission.

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

#183

Post by d1sxeyes »

IshKebab wrote: post #121
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.

The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even). Here's an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo I think they're an outlier, but still I was disappointed by Ars's response. They deleted the article and didn't detail what was wrong with it at all. Felt like a cover-up.

To be completely fair, BBC news is effectively a different organisation which has the BBC name. There's a fairly good overview of it here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko

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

#184

Post by bayindirh »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #104
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 at this level because the editors have always had low standers. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading. They’ve had this problem for years. They will publish anything that gets them clicks. They do not care if a writer makes things up. They do not care if their headlines are misleading - in fact, that’s the point. They clearly got into the job in order to i…

> I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading.

I believe they are doing A/B testing on these.

Ah yes, I remember correctly for once: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-front-page-arti...

TL;DR: They are doing mandatory A/B testing since 2015.

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

#185

Post by AlexeyBelov »

hnarn wrote: post #165
itvision wrote: post #164

[flagged]

Calling Ars Technica "woke far left" is crazy, the U.S. really is lost to complete fractionalist brainrot.

True, but this user is Russian. But otherwise you're right, it's essentially the same brainrot.

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

#186

Post by simianwords »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #104
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 at this level because the editors have always had low standers. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading. They’ve had this problem for years. They will publish anything that gets them clicks. They do not care if a writer makes things up. They do not care if their headlines are misleading - in fact, that’s the point. They clearly got into the job in order to i…

Example?

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

#187

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

fp64 wrote: post #181
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there's a potential different story with this. He felt that he had no option but to do work, even though he was so sick that he failed at the job. What's up with that? How insecure and pressured is his employment? If it's not true then the error is on him. But it seems plausibly bad to me as an outside observer of US employment and healthcare customs. And the precarity of journalism nowadays. It is a sad…

Circumstances can help explain, but never excuse unethical behavior

Systems can make such failures inevitable. The language of "blame" vs. "excuse" is not the most relevant.

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

#188

Post by klustregrif »

This reads like “I was sick and my dog accidentally used AI to write my homework”

If the content is human written and you check your sources there is no way for AI to “accidentally” seep in. Sure you can use an AI tool to find links to places you should check and you can then go and verify sources. That’s obviously not what happened.

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

#189

Post by PunchyHamster »

breput wrote: post #55

As much as I respect the site and gladly financially support it, this is ultimately a failure on Ars Technica and its editors. If there are any. If this were just some random blogger, then yes the blame is totally theirs. But this was published under the Ars Technica masthead and there should have been someone or something double checking the veracity of the contents. That said, there are a number of Ars Technica con…

I think you have far too much faith in the process for the big media sites

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

#190

Post by thomassmith65 »

vadansky wrote: post #21

Good time to watch Shattered Glass. Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.

It's an excellent movie, regardless.

  "When this thing blows there isn't going to be a magazine anymore!"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oj79mp2WEx0
Post reply on HN