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Our newsroom AI policy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#21

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Context:

"An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.

...

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed.

...

Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes" [1].

[1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#22

Post by mellosouls »

Related discussions from a couple months ago:

Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes (606 points, 394 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations (308 points, 211 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#23

Post by applfanboysbgon »

Paracompact wrote: post #16
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any verification process thorough enough to catch all LLM fabrications would take more work than simply not using the LLM in the first place. If anything verifying what an LLM wrote is substantially more difficult than just reading the material it's "summarising", because you need to fully read and comprehend the material and then also keep in mind what the LLM generated to contrast and at that point what the fuck ar…

> I believe this policy can never result in a positive outcome. I get where you're coming from (I'm learning more and more over time that every sentence or line of code I "trust" an AI with, will eventually come back to bite me), but this is too absolutist. Really, no positive result, ever, in any context? We need more nuanced understanding of this technology than "always good" or "always bad."

I didn't say in any context. I'm specifically talking about this policy on journalistic research.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#24

Post by Rekindle8090 »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…

[dead]

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#25

Post by knighthack »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…

> LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention.

I don't know what you've been doing, but the summaries I get from my LLMs have been rather accurate.

And in any event, summaries are just that - summaries.

They don't need to be 100% accurate. Demanding that is unreasonable.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#26

Post by carefree-bob »

knighthack wrote: post #25
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…

> LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention. I don't know what you've been doing, but the summaries I get from…

Yes, search and summarization is where LLMs shine. I use them all the time for that, and much less for code generation. I would say search > summarization > debugging > code gen/image gen

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#27

Post by suddenlybananas »

knighthack wrote: post #25
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…

> LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention. I don't know what you've been doing, but the summaries I get from…

>They don't need to be 100% accurate. Demanding that is unreasonable.

If an intern was routinely making up stuff in the summaries they provided to their bosses, they'd be let go.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#28

Post by Angostura »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #13
brey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next sentence after your quoted section: “Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.”

Any verification process thorough enough to catch all LLM fabrications would take more work than simply not using the LLM in the first place. If anything verifying what an LLM wrote is substantially more difficult than just reading the material it's "summarising", because you need to fully read and comprehend the material and then also keep in mind what the LLM generated to contrast and at that point what the fuck ar…

Disagree. If I’m I’m a reporter and I’m trawling though a mass data dump - say the Epstein files or Wilileaks or statistics on environmental spills or something, using AI to pull out potential patterns in the data, or find specific references can be useful. Obviously you go and then check the particular citations. This will still save a lot of time.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#29

Post by cubefox »

vintagedave wrote: post #6

> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very et…

> and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes.

Publishing things online for free (as Ars does) is difficult business. I doubt they can realistically afford an "editorial team" which checks quotes. Paying the journalists is expensive enough.

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