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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

#271

Post by bayindirh »

donohoe wrote: post #257
bayindirh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore. It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened. I also want to note that, this last incident response is not…

No. That can happen but it’s not the only path. An article can be retracted. That said, it’s usually noted somewhere else.

You're right, but I told about what Ars does 99.999% of the time. This is the only exception I see Ars retracts an article and buries it deep like this.

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

#272

Post by hluska »

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…

Republishing an article with corrected quotes is reserved for cases where an editorial team can trust the substance of an article. There is an error but that error doesn’t impact the amount of trust the editorial team has in the article.

A retraction is totally different. It means that an editorial team does not trust any of the underlying article. It’s the biggest stick in journalism and is only reserved for the absolute worst breaches of trust.

When you retract an article and then update the author’s bio to past tense, that’s as clear of a signal as you can ethically send. A publication with clout makes news and writes the first line of people’s obituaries while they’re still alive - a degree of tact, professionalism and newsworthiness comes into play.

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

#273

Post by crazygringo »

bayindirh wrote: post #123
jrmg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore. It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened. I also want to note that, this last incident response is not…

I don't know what you're basing that on.

It seems entirely normal and standard to retract articles and publish a note elsewhere that it was retracted. In fact, it's common because if an article had one fabrication it might have others which you haven't discovered yet, so you don't want to keep it up.

Whether they want to announce that the journalist was fired is up to their discretion. But it's not necessary or even normal.

I don't know why you're talking about a "mark", a "scar", that "immortalizes". That's weird and frankly a little disturbing. The journalist got fired and the article got taken down and a note was made by the editor. That's accountability working as intended. I don't know why you want more than that.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by smallerize »

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…

There's no point trying to update an article with fake sources. If you can't trust the material, there's no story. I think pulling it was the right move here.

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

#276

Post by jcgrillo »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #262
watwut wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accidentally taking down production should not lead to firing. It should lead to improved process Making up quotes for article, with technology or not, should lead to firing.

"should lead to firing..." ... and, also, improved processes. There should be no way an individual writer can damage the brand to this extent with absolutely no checks or oversight. This was just an error, but a bad actor could've put something far, far worse out there. Even an automated quote-checker might have helped in this case.

Fact checking is a vital part of the editorial process and clearly that process failed here. Tech people often have a double standard when it comes to journalism--rules for thee but not for me. However the structure is fairly analogous, in that both professions ship under lots of time pressure where mistakes can be costly. I'm not sure, honestly, who is most at fault here or why only the reporter was terminated. But my comment above was to highlight that there shouldn't be a double standard--if you think a journalist should be fired for this kind of error it would be inconsistent to believe a software engineer shouldn't.

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

#277

Post by bayindirh »

crazygringo wrote: post #273
bayindirh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore. It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened. I also want to note that, this last incident response is not…

I don't know what you're basing that on. It seems entirely normal and standard to retract articles and publish a note elsewhere that it was retracted. In fact, it's common because if an article had one fabrication it might have others which you haven't discovered yet, so you don't want to keep it up. Whether they want to announce that the journalist was fired is up to their discretion. But it's not necessary or even…

First, I didn't want him to be fired, frankly. I have a comment telling exactly that when this thing happened.

Second, as a reader following Ars for more than 10 (15?, IDK) years, I never seen them abruptly retract an article like this. Their modus operandi is correct and own the corrections. This is what I always said (this is the third time in a comment train).

We all have scars. From a fall, from a cut, physical, emotional, whatnot. You don't need to feel sad, or get disturbed about it. A scar is a life's way of making you remember something. If it's your own making, it makes you remember what not to do. If it's someone else's making, it's makes you remember an unfortunate event you made out alive.

Owning your mistakes by correcting an article and marking it is greater accountability than saying "this has never happened, nothing to see here, move along". I'll not comment further on firing of the author. I don't have enough information on any side, or I don't know them close enough to say anything further than I wish he didn't get fired.

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

#279

Post by smallerize »

skygazer wrote: post #61
danso wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?

Is it “plagiarism” to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren’t taken, but plagiarism doesn’t seem like the right word, as quotes are almost definitionally not plagiarism. But maybe these were paraphrasings masquerading as quotes, so maybe that’s the difference.

Maybe it's plagiarism because he did not attribute the LLM output to the LLM.

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

#280

Post by tehjoker »

jrmg wrote: post #117
Gigachad wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work the conversation is that simultaneously everyone is using LLMs now, yet we receive virtually no traffic through them. The LLMs scrape our data, provide an answer to the user, and we see nothing from it.

I have the same worry about LLMs in general - I know that ‘model collapse’ seems to be an unfashionable idea, but when the internet’s just full of garbage (soon?…), what are we going to train these things on?

They moved away from raw text and are now working with verifiable synthetic data (eg math, games, code) to improve general reasoning.
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