I read the bluesky in article posted and Benj Edward's images that he had sent in bluesky.
The main comment I found relevant is probably this (There is more that he has written but I am pasting what I find relevant for my comment)
> I have been sick with Covid all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this, On friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep. I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh
...
> I should have takena. sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh's words rather than his actual words.
> Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline against the original blog source before including them in my draft
The journalistic system has failed us so much that in the news cycle, we want things NOW. I think ars-technica post went viral on HN as well before the whole controversy and none were wiser until Sam commented about the false quotes.
It prefers views and to get views you have to do work now. There is no room left for someone being sick and I think that this sort of expands to every job at times.
And instead of AI being a productive tool, it can act as a noise generator. It writes enough noise that looks like signal and Tada, none are the wiser.
People think that using AI with an person is gonna make their work 10x more but what's gonna happen is the noise is raised 10x more and the work of finding signal from that noise is gonna increase 10x more (I am speaking about employment related projects, obv in personal projects this might not matter if it might have 10x noise or 100x noise if it can just do the thing you want it to do)
When AI systems are constrained, they can deny you your api request with marginal loss. But when Human people are constrained, they really can't deny your employee's request without taking massive losses at times (whole day leaves) and I have heard in some countries, sick days can be a joke. This could very well be cultural because sick days are well implemented in Europe compared to america (from what I hear)
I don't know about Benj but some reporters are really paid peanuts. Remember the pakistani newspaper which had pasted Chatgpt Verbatim with content like "“If you want, I can also create an even snappier ‘front-page style’ version with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?." WITHIN the newspaper.
I believe that humans should be treated with more dignity so that they feel comfortable around taking sick leaves when they are sick... or just fixing this culture that we have of people chugging along in sick leaves.
Until then, AI is bound to be used, I don't think that this is gonna be a single incident, and AI will produce noise/spew random stuff. Imagine you are a journalist and you are sick and you feel like there's a magical tool which can do the job for you when you are sick. You use it and in the moments of sickness, you are in the IDGAF attitude and push the article to main.
I personally don't believe that this is gonna be a single incident with this whole story playing out like this at the very least.
If any Journalist is reading this, please take sick leaves when you are sick. Readers appreciate your writing and I hope you don't integrate AI tools into your workflow (a lot) that the work is started being done by AI in this case. Even without AI I feel like you guys might not be working at the best mental space and Readers are happy to wait if you add unique perspectives into the story, something I don't think is possible when you are sick. If any employer try to still pressure you, just share this message to them haha to tell your employer what the people want (and what brings them money long term).
I also hate how the culture has become of finding the article which came the fastest after an event happens because that would promote AI use more often than not and it to me feels like jackals coming out of nowhere to try to take whatever piece you can take out of a particular news and that to me doesn't feel soo great of look. (I know nothing about how such journalism works so sorry if I am wrong about anything, I usually am but these are just my opinions on the whole thing)