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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

#381

Post by bandrami »

etchalon wrote: post #349
bandrami wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That absolutely should be career-ending for a journalist, apology or no

Not "career-ending" but definitely back a few paces. This wasn't outright fabrication, it was a sloppy editorial workflow that resulted in hallucinations being published as fast (which is absolutely going to be get more and more common unless newsrooms develop specific guards against it).

How is it not "outright fabrication"? Quotes were attributed to a subject that he didn't say. That's fabrication.

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

#382

Post by true_religion »

Barbing wrote: post #378
true_religion wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively… there was no AI error, the reporter made up the quotes, and lied when they were challenged.

Are you familiar with the reporter's work & reputation?

Are we talking about the same guy who purportedly never even read an article with their name on it containing multiple insulting false quotes and was summarily dismissed?

Mind you, I’m not purporting malice but their choosing the blame AI rather than brain fog, bad notes, accidental transcription, or any other human error which would us look down upon them more.

Right now, AI errors like this are excusable. Soon they won’t be.

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

#383

Post by eviks »

afavour wrote: post #338
madamelic wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I don't understand journalism but this guy being a reporter, shouldn't he have had an editor reviewing his work before they hit publish? I understand trusting a senior reporter but I would think due to libel concerns, they would check people's quotes ESPECIALLY if the reporter was sick. Honestly it seems like journalism has been in their 'vibe code' era for a decade where they just publish whatever typos and al…

Sadly this is a reality of the money disappearing from the journalism industry. You're right, there absolutely should be fact checkers. A reporter absolutely shouldn't be filing while sick. And the big news orgs still do that. But I doubt Ars has the resources.

Should fact checkers have fact checkers to check the the first batch wasn't incompetent and didn't use AI to rewrite the article to add more "facts"?

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

#384

Post by aidenn0 »

Aurornis wrote: post #325
aidenn0 wrote: post #35

I 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.

> 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 You don’t need an institutional push to make people take shortcuts. Many people will take shortcuts to work less if they think they won’t get caught. You don’t even need external pressure.

But an institutional push can make bad workers drive out the good.

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

#385

Post by neya »

dang wrote: post #127
neya wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just had to ask you this in a different context. Sorry, I just searched my comment history, maybe I missed it? Was it recent?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223723

Ok, some of the stuff - like calling out the community for NPC behaviour (aggressively), I wasn't aware was in the guidelines, but it totally makes sense. Won't happen again. The Ars Technica one? Screw them. That's on me. But, like you said, I do owe it to the community to not turn it into a reddit thread, so, I will be mindful next time. Thanks, dang.

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

#386

Post by rgblambda »

kitd wrote: post #193
d1sxeyes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be completely fair, BBC news is effectively a different organisation which has the BBC name. There's a fairly good overview of it here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko

BBC News does have to report on itself from time to time. Here's it's "live" feed from November on the Parliamentary Committee investigation into the Trump speech edit incident: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp34d5ly76lt (edit: technically, it was Panorama. I'm not sure if that is part of the News remit or separate from it).

Panorama is technically part of News. The CEO of News resigned over the trump edit as well as the Director General. Though an independent production company (October Films) produced the documentary, they claim BBC News Panorama team had final say over the editing. The BBC doesn't seem to have ever disputed this.

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

#387

Post by vintagedave »

crazygringo wrote: post #370
vintagedave wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Copy-paste-google would be a sanity check for 99% of them.

Because they're busy doing the rest of their job? They don't have enough time for it, nor is it a good use of their time. That's like asking why the CEO of a 20-person startup isn't reading every line of code for bugs. It's not the best use of their valuable time.

It's their responsibility.

It is, therefore, absolutely a good use of their time.

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

#388

Post by didntknowya »

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…

why should ars technica have to publish grovelling apologies to satisfy their readers. it's not a tabloid.

and as it's obviously a HR issue both parties are restricted to what they can say, if they want to provide more details on their personal feeds and people are interested they can find out respectively.

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

#389

Post by didntknowya »

b112 wrote: post #152
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…

Editorial staff? There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000. Then, as profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely disappeared. Purely online entities have no way to pay for real editorial staff. News has no money, compared to news of old. It's part of the reason 99% of modern news is just reporting other people's tweets or whatever. I can't imagine many news companies having much money for court battles…

yea it's a tech news blog people are acting like it should be a peer reviewed journal or something.
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