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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

#191

Post by bombcar »

usefulposter wrote: post #181
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 ha…

This is just one of the reasons archiving is so important in the digital era; it's key to keeping people honest.

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

#192

Post by bombcar »

khannn wrote: post #102
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…

Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong. I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

ServeTheHome has something akin to the old techy feel, but it has its own specific niche.

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

#193

Post by bombcar »

ddtaylor wrote: post #167
meowface wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have been extremely pro-AI and have been for decades, and I use LLMs daily, but this is not an acceptable use of an LLM. Especially since it's fabricating quotes, so there's the plagiarism issue and then the veracity issue. And it's doing this to report on an incident of someone being bizarrely accosted by LLMs. Just such a ridiculous situation all around.

Do you think Ars is lazy or ambitious?

Anyone ambitious left after Condé Nast showed up. So that leaves one option remaining.

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

#194

Post by bombcar »

zahlman wrote: post #62
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #44

The ars technica twist is a brutal wakeup call that I can't actually tell what is ai slob garbage shit by reading it- and even if I can't tell, that doesn't mean it's fine because the crap these companies are shoveling is still wrong, just stylistically below my detectability. I think I need to log off.

Skimming through the archive of the Ars piece, it's indeed much better written than the "ai slob garbage shit" standard I'm used to. I think I could adapt to detect this sort of thing to a limited extent, but it's pretty scarily authentic-looking and would not ordinarily trip my "ai;dr" instinct.

There is a ton of money to be made right now being an AI slop regurgitation - if you can take AI slop and rewrite it in your own words quickly, you can make a nice buck because it doesn't immediately trip the rAIdar everyone's built up.

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

#195

Post by Pay08 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

The discourse in the Rust community is way better than that, and I believe being a toxic shit-hat in that community would lead to immediate consequences. Even when there was very serious controversy (the canceled conference talk about reflection) it was deviously phrased through reverse psychology where those on the wronged side wrote blogposts expressing their deep 'heartbreak' and 'weeping with pain and disappointm…

That's merely a different sort of being a toxic shit-hat.

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

#196

Post by svara »

andrewflnr wrote: post #59
gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR wa…

If past patterns are anything to go by, the complexity moves up to a different level of abstraction.

Don't take this as a concrete prediction - I don't know what will happen - but rather an example of the type of thing that might happen:

We might get much better tooling around rigorously proving program properties, and the best jobs in the industry will be around using them to design, specify and test critical systems, while the actual code that's executing is auto-generated. These will continue to be great jobs that require deep expertise and command excellent salaries.

At the same, a huge population of technically-interested-but-not-that-technical workers build casual no-code apps and the stereotypical CRUD developer just goes extinct.

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

#197

Post by bombcar »

Aurornis wrote: post #18

Ars Technica publishing an article with hallucinated quotes is really disappointing. That site has fallen so far. I remember John Siracusa’s excellent Mac OS release reviews and all of the author authors who really seemed to care about their coverage. Now it feels like another site distilling (or hallucinating, now) news and rumors from other sites to try to capture some of the SEO pie with as little effort as possib…

It's really a depressing condemnation of "news as entertainment" as a whole. The saga somehow hits harder than Slashdot being sold in a way.

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

#198

Post by rectang »

llbbdd wrote: post #173
rectang wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception.

Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere days. I can wait that long before throwing away two lives, even if you can’t.

> Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them

Evaluating whether Ars Technica establishes credible accountability mechanisms, such as hiring an Ombud, is at least as important as punishing individuals.

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

#199

Post by Pay08 »

zahlman wrote: post #62
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #44

The ars technica twist is a brutal wakeup call that I can't actually tell what is ai slob garbage shit by reading it- and even if I can't tell, that doesn't mean it's fine because the crap these companies are shoveling is still wrong, just stylistically below my detectability. I think I need to log off.

Skimming through the archive of the Ars piece, it's indeed much better written than the "ai slob garbage shit" standard I'm used to. I think I could adapt to detect this sort of thing to a limited extent, but it's pretty scarily authentic-looking and would not ordinarily trip my "ai;dr" instinct.

It might not be AI-written at all. It might be written by a human with the research being done by AI.

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

#200

Post by bombcar »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #72

I was surprised to see so many top comments here pointing fingers at Ars Technica. Their article is really beside the point (and the author of this post says as much). Am I coming across as alarmist to suggest that, due to agents, perhaps the internet as we know it (IAWKI) may be unrecognizable (if it exists at all) in a year's time? Phishing emails, Nigerian princes, all that other spam, now done at scale I would sa…

The Internet is dead, long live the Internet.

LLMs are just revealing the weaknesses inherent in unsecured online communications - you have never met me (that we know of) and you have no idea if I'm an LLM, a dog, a human, or an alien.

We're going to have to go back to our roots and build up a web of trust again; all the old shibboleths and methods don't work.

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