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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

#41

Post by epistasis »

areoform wrote: post #38
aizk wrote: post #26

I 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.

I know a lot of people that don't get through their email every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time, with the volume of communication required by daily work.

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

#42

Post by lich_king »

I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.

When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?

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

#43

Post by kittikitti »

dang wrote: post #31
neya wrote: post #24

[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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

You probably wish everyone would post as bots do, without em—dashes of course.

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

#45

Post by nsxwolf »

lich_king wrote: post #42

I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while. When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?

Sad if true. I used to really enjoy reading his freelance articles in various publications pre-AI.

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

#47

Post by zarflax »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #9

So the original blogger got slandered by an LLM agent, then got slandered again by a human journalist who used an LLM agent to write the article about him getting slandered by an LLM agent? How ironic. But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the journalist? New questions for the new…

No, the journalist came in and slandered the LLM Twice and Jim Fell.

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

#48

Post by sparky_z »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #9

So the original blogger got slandered by an LLM agent, then got slandered again by a human journalist who used an LLM agent to write the article about him getting slandered by an LLM agent? How ironic. But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the journalist? New questions for the new…

He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting. But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander isn't just a synonym of "lie".

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

#49

Post by SchemaLoad »

raincole wrote: post #39

I 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.

It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles

I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.

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

#50

Post by AnonC »

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 that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.

There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.

It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.

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