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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

#211

Post by g947o »

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…

Same for the Verge. Sometimes their headline or content contains factual errors. If you point it out in the comment, sometimes they do it properly and add a correction, other times they quietly fix it and delete your comment. So much for their free speech stance and editorial practice.

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

#212

Post by g947o »

jrmg wrote: post #116
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…

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.

If a news organization publishes an article welcoming someone onboard, they should also do that when someone is fired because of a scandal.

Of course, if someone leaves because of personal reasons or jumping ship, there is no reason to do that. But this is different.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #49
raincole wrote: post #39

I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years. I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.

It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by g947o »

anakaine wrote: post #143
kergonath wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars never commented about firing staff before, and it happened on several occasions. You get the occasional article when someone joins, never when someone leaves. They should have published another article after all this, but I would not expect them to comment about staff.

And I think thats a good thing. People screw up, and journalists are people. This person's punishment for their screw up was losing their job. They do not need to be dragged into a hit piece. Ars can, and probably should if they have not already, publish a piece about hallucinations and use of AI in journalism, and own up to their own lack of appropriate controls and reflections. They do not need to drag the authors…

Nobody needs to publish a hit piece.

Ars could have just said "After investigation, we reviewed our editorial process. The author of the article is no longer with the company." factually and objectively.

I can't see how this could possibly be a negative or harmful thing.

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

#215

Post by g947o »

raincole wrote: post #39

I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years. I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.

We must be using different Google.com.

Sometimes I use a completely meaningless combination of keywords by mistake, and AI Overview will happily make up a story telling me what I am looking for.

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

#216

Post by lynx97 »

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.

When more and more typos started to creep into news articles of our state-owned, national news feed and people started to notice, the explanation we got was basically that the frequency of news articles is so supposedly so high that it is supposedly impossible to catch them. If news orgs can't even do as much proof reading that they catch typos and grammatical errors, I highly doubt anyone is still doing editorial checking...

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

#217

Post by latexr »

DamnableNook wrote: post #155
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…

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…

> that old fallacy that you think the news is correct about everything, until they report about something you know.

Gell-Mann Amnesia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

The description is slightly backwards. The problem is you continue to trust the news after seeing how wrong they are about something on which you’re an expert.

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

#218

Post by ModernMech »

kolinko wrote: post #162
ModernMech wrote: post #89

I'm very bad with names and quotes, so sometimes I'll ask ChatGPT something like "what's that famous quote Brian Kernighan said about programming language names" and it will just make shit up, when really I was thinking about Donald Knuth. But according to ChatGPT, Kernighan famously said: “Everyone knows that Perl is designed to make easy things easy, and hard things possible, but nobody knows why it’s called Perl.”…

Which version? I just tested mine and it replied with an actual quote

The model hosted at chat.com gave me that. It told me what he said about debugging, but also included that made up quote as well which it attributed to him. But what it should have said was "Kernighan has no famous quotes about naming languages, you're probably thinking of the quote by Knuth about the importance of naming in language design."

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

#219

Post by rob_c »

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…

> It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.

This was from a journalist _who_is_hired_as_expert_ at knowing of/about tooling that hallucinates (LLM ((AI)) chatbots). Decides to implicitly trust said technology to write a "hit piece" (lets be honest it was).

In several territories that would fall under slander and if is untrue is a major journalistic mis-step and career ending faux-pas.

Why in any situation would their position now be defendable?

This is akin to being a journalist of iron-mongering writing a "truth" piece on how "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" (if you don't get my reference here, lucky you). It's outright un-professional.

Blaming it on illness allows everyone to save face, but they were compos mentis enough to hit publish at the time. That itself carries a certain "I'm well enough to agree this is a good article" from said author.

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

#220

Post by mikkupikku »

katzgrau wrote: post #208
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The money used to go to Hearst and co. The golden age of journalism is mostly a mirage.
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