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Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

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

#201

Post by mikkupikku »

jcgrillo wrote: post #111
lynx97 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between an error and totally misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no sympathy for journalists getting caught producing hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and should always result in that person being fired.

Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let that shit through code review, and a customer impacting outage results, that should be instant termination. But it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to be held "blameless" right?

I love vibe coding but you are absolutely right. We're at the stage where vibe coding is a fun way to produce sloppy software and that's fine if the intended user is just yourself and you're fully informed about what you're getting into. But actually shipping vibe coded slop to other people is wacky, anybody doing the needs to be manually reviewing every commit very carefully and needs to be prepared to accept personal responsibility for anything that slips by.

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

#202

Post by maplethorpe »

> Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and “while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep,” he “unintentionally made a serious journalistic error” as he attempted to use an “experimental Claude Code-based AI tool”

I'm skeptical. I hate to be the one to say it, but I don't think this would have happened if he was using Claude 4.6 Opus.

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

#203

Post by mikkupikku »

lukan wrote: post #148
vasco wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3 people that work at Reuters actually doing journalism are not doing in ANY way a similar job to the millions writing blog posts for Ars Technica like publications. The latter is an ad seller indeed. And the majority of publications that are renowned also do little to no journalism. It's as if we called "web devs" that learned JS on udemy and just vibe code, Computer Scientists and treated them as if they publis…

Eric Berger at Ars for instance is someone I consider a journalist. Have you proof, that he systematically neglects truth in favor of ad selling?

Berger is a real one. I'm surprised he's lasted so long at Ars Technica. I think eventually his objective reporting of SpaceX will get the Are Technica reader base to demand his firing, Ars readers are very reddit-like. Team minded, not interested I hearing dispassionate takes. Hearing Elon Musk criticized as a person while simultaneously seeing SpaceX described as a real and highly accomplished company gives reddit/ars readers tonal whiplash, such people prefer simple narratives without nuance.

See also, in this very thread, somebody who thinks Berger has a strong pro-musk bias because his reporting and books say that SpaceX are good at what they do.

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

#205

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

maplethorpe wrote: post #202

> Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and “while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep,” he “unintentionally made a serious journalistic error” as he attempted to use an “experimental Claude Code-based AI tool” I'm skeptical. I hate to be the one to say it, but I don't think this would have happened if he was using Claude 4.6 Opus.

It's another way of saying "dog ate my homework".

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

#206

Post by mikkupikku »

vintagedave wrote: post #161
beloch wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words,” Edwards continued. He emphasized that the “text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars‘ editorial standards." ---------- A reporter whose bailiwick is AI should have known that he needed to check any quotes an LLM spat out. The editorial staff should…

Yes: in newsrooms, this is the editor's responsibility. I note the editor wasn't fired.

It's the editors responsibility to make sure fabricated quotes don't get published, but it's also the journalist's responsibility to not paste fabricated quotes from a chatbot into their articles. The responsibility of the former doesn't negate the responsibility of the latter.

I can't just submit shit work all day long then blame QA when some of it goes through. That's like a burglar saying it's the cops fault that people got burglared.

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

#207

Post by bmurphy1976 »

vintagedave wrote: post #160
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…

I'm sad to see them fire him. I've seen far worse: I have always approached issues by asking for accountability and improvement. Frankly, he already did: he openly apologised. I was very happy with that, it demonstrated integrity and I remained respecting him. Even worse, > I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick) [0] In an earlier HN thread, I saw someone ask why Ar…

He posted his not very impressive apology as images not text that is easily indexed. I do think that was purposeful and manipulative and very much makes me question his motivation. If I'm missing the original posting in text I'd sure like to know so I can correct this perception.

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

#208

Post by katzgrau »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #198
b112 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editorial staff? There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000. Then, as profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely disappeared. Purely online entities have no way to pay for real editorial staff. News has no money, compared to news of old. It's part of the reason 99% of modern news is just reporting other people's tweets or whatever. I can't imagine many news companies having much money for court battles…

Agreed. Modern news is beyond lazy, and is not journalism by any means. Too many talking heads do nothing but sit behind a screen watching others for what to say next. Granted, a few of the remaining newspapers I'm aware of run business awards (Best restaurant, etc), and the way to win is via wining and dining them, even though the paper claims it's based on people's votes. That style of thinking - of entitlement - p…

I think you missed the point of the parent comment.

The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).

It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff.

Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k.

That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.

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

#209

Post by mikkupikku »

vintagedave wrote: post #160
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…

I'm sad to see them fire him. I've seen far worse: I have always approached issues by asking for accountability and improvement. Frankly, he already did: he openly apologised. I was very happy with that, it demonstrated integrity and I remained respecting him. Even worse, > I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick) [0] In an earlier HN thread, I saw someone ask why Ar…

You're taking his fever dream excuse at face value, and I think you probably shouldn't. It reads like a lame excuse to deflect personal responsibility, a cynical face-saving tactic.

If the illness was genuine, can he document that he advised management of this fever and they told him to submit an article anyway? It's not his bosses job to stick a thermometer up his ass every morning.

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

#210

Post by NicuCalcea »

aizk wrote: post #26

I have a story with Benji. Last year I went viral, and Benji was the first person to interview me. It was a really cool experience, we chatted via Twitter dms, and he wrote a piece about my work - overall did a decent job. Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he wanted to cover us. No response. Then, tech crunch wrote an article on our…

I'm a journalist. As a general rule, if someone approaches me with a pitch for a feature or investigation (not news piece) that was already published elsewhere, I'll turn it down. To be fair, I turn down all PR pitches, but there are journalists who don't but still want an exclusive.

It sometimes happens that you spend weeks or months working on a story, only to be scooped by another publication. It sucks, especially if you think your story is the better one, but unless you can pivot or add a substantial amount of new insight, it won't come out.

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