[flagged]
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? I just had to ask you this in a different context.
You may not owe your least favorite publications better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
31–40 of 409 posts
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#32[deleted]
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published." Nothing suspicious about heavy use of qualifiers in a non-apology blanket denial. Where's the Polymarket for whether this guy has a job next month? https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...
> whether this guy has a job next month? That’s a problem. If he really hasn’t apologized, neither he nor Ars have recognized there is a problem, which means it will happen again.
Is there something to the story that I'm missing? Why does Orland need to apologize? Edwards fabricated the quotes via AI and seemingly presented them to Orland as authentic. Orland had no reason to suspect the quotes weren't real until after publishing.
When journalists are working on a shared byline, they don't each do the same research in order to fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of trust required for collaborating like this and Edwards violated that trust.
You can say this is a failure by the editorial process for not including fact checking, but that is an organizational issue with Ars, it's not the fault of Orland for failing to duplicate the work that he believed his coauthor did.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#34The headline says Ars fired the reporter, but AFAICT the article doesn't include any facts that indicate this. All we know is that he no longer works there, and that Ars refused to provide any additional information.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#35I don't know that this is what happened here, but any time there is a push to do more with less, you end up rewarding people who take shortcuts over those who do a proper job, and from the outside, it looks like journalism has a push to do more with less.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#36[flagged]
Can you elaborate? Perhaps I haven't noticed that they push pro-sponsored content (what does this mean, exactly?). I do find their comment section to be pretty lousy, and very partisan. But the tech coverage always seemed fair enough. What am I missing?
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#37[deleted]
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#38I 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…
Sometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know how to say no.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#39I 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.
Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
#40people have said enough about the ethics of all of it but what I found even sadder is that the story made me curious to take a look at the actual piece he "investigated" with AI, it's this one (https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...) This is btw a bit more than 1k words, which takes the average American reader, not senior journalist, ~5 minutes.
This whole story involved asking Claude to mine this text for quotes, which refused because it included harassment related content, then asking ChatGPT to explain that, and so on.
That entire ordeal probably generated more text from the chatbots than just reading the few paragraphs of the blogpost. That's why I think the "I'm sick" angle doesn't matter much. This is the same brainrot as people who go "grok what does this mean" under every twitter post. It's like a schoolchild who cheats and expends more energy cheating than just learning what they're supposed to.