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The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not..
They're both still on the staff page presently. https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
"Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
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I don't know how you could possibly have that take away from reading this. They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident and reaffirmed that it did not follow the journalistic standards they have set for themselves. They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.
> That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions. Sounds optional.
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
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The comments are trending towards being more critical as of my posting. A lot more asking what they're going to do about the authors, and what the hell happened.
> Greatly appreciate this direct statement clarifying your standards, and yet another reason that I hope Ars can remain a strong example of quality journalism in a world where that is becoming hard to find > Kudos to ARS for catching this and very publicly stating it. > Thank you for upholding your journalistic standards. And a note to our current administration in DC - this is what transparency looks like. > Thank y…
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They're expected by policy to not use AI. Lying about using AI is also malice.
It's a reckless disregard for the readers and the subjects of the article. Still not malice though, which is about intent to harm.
What are they changing to prevent this from happening in the future? Why was the use of LLMs not disclosed in the original article? Do they host any other articles covertly generated by LLMs? As far as I can tell, the pulled article had no obvious tells and was caught only because the quotes were entirely made up. Surely it's not the only one, though?
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No one said it was defensible. They drew a distinction between incompetence and malice. Let's not misquote each other here in the comments.
Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal…
Honestly I'm just not astounded by that level of incompetence. I'm not saying I'm impressed or that's it's okay. But I've heard much worse stories of journalistic malpractice. It's a topical, disposable article. Again, that doesn't justify anything, but it doesn't surprise me that a short summary of a series of forum exchanges and blog posts was low effort.
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.