Earlier quoted context omitted.
A/B headline testing is just scientific clickbait.
I didn't argue that it isn't?
I was agreeing; anyone who admits to using A/B headline testing is just admitting to be a clickbait factory.
Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
241–250 of 409 posts
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#242Man, the IRONY hurts. I love Ars for what they do and their comment section. The readers there are borderline militant about AI's more problematic uses. This could have gone only one way.
The comment section under any AI-related article is unbelievably negative, and the headlines are feeding the fire too.
Ashley Belanger's articles are the most notorious examples, like "Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI". The actual content has nothing to do with AI; Meta simply spends on AI infrastructure from profits made elsewhere...
I still read and sub to Ars - as they are the least bad source of day-to-day technews - but quality is dropping.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#243Journalists 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 note that Ken Fisher did post an editor’s note, Benj did publicly own up to it, and all of this was mentioned in the article.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#244Journalists 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.
They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity above all.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#245I 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…
> 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. [...] > I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded, but said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive that he could only report on things that didn't have any prior or pre-ex…
>The US mentality might be different, but at least having grown up and living in Germany, such an annoying hustler who wants to use some journalist as a marketing influencer for his private project is a huge no-no. In other words: it is a very reasonable decision (perhaps even the only right one) for any journalist to fob off such a hustler.
Yeah there seems to be a thing where in the US, what's seen as "selling yourself" or "putting your best foot forward" is considered excessive self-promotion / tall poppy behavior in other cultures.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#246The irony is Ars readers tend to be fairly anti LLM in the comments of every article
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree. In my experience, no one cares when you are sick. No one. Maybe your mom, but that's it. Using it as an excuse when you make a mistake is even worse. People value responsibility... "Sorry, my bad, won't happen again", not excuses.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#248"He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.”
Yeah, no.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#249Earlier 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.
Isn't that the factchecker's job?
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 person…
The problem is that reviewing code for correctness is harder than writing correct code. So these things will always slip through review. I'm a little bit divided here whether we can (or should) blame a reviewer too harshly for letting broken code through review whether it's LLM or human generated.
I've worked on teams with a rubber stamp review culture where you're seen as a problem if you "slow things down" too much with thorough review. I've also worked on teams that see value in correctness and rigor. I've never worked on a team where a reviewer is putting their job on the line every time they click "Approve". And culturally, I'm not sure I'd want to.
That said I think it's pretty clear we need mechanisms that better hold engineers to account for signing off on things they shouldn't have. In some engineering domains you can lose your license for this kind of thing, and I feel like we need some analogous structure for the profession of software engineering.