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Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

arstechnica.com

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Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#51

Post by [deleted] »

lapcat wrote: post #41
throw3e98 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.

> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process. That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door. Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk. Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one artic…

[deleted]

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#52

Post by maxbond »

g947o wrote: post #44
throw3e98 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.

They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.

No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility.

If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#53

Post by maxbond »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #3

Zero repercussions for the senior editor involved in fabricating quotations (they neglect to even name the culprit), so this is essentially an open confession that Ars has zero (really, negative) journalistic integrity and will continue to blatantly fabricate articles rather than even pretending to do journalism, so long as they don't get caught. To get to the stage where an editor who has been at the company for 14…

What is the evidence that lead you to believe there have been no repercussions? In what world do they retract the article without at a minimum giving a stern warning to the people involved?

If they had named the people involved, the criticism would be, "they aren't taking responsibility, they're passing the buck to these employees."

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#54

Post by jmward01 »

I see a lot of negative comments on this retraction about how they could have done it better. Things can always be done better but I think the important thing is that they did it at all. Too many 'news' outlets today just ignore their egregious errors, misrepresentations and outright lies and get away with it. I find it refreshing to see not just a correction, but a full retraction of this article. We need to encourage actual journalistic integrity when we see it, even if it is imperfect. This retraction gives me more faith in future articles from them since I know there is at least some editorial review, even if it isn't perfect.

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#55

Post by hibikir »

andrewflnr wrote: post #18
blell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.

They're expected by policy to not use AI. Lying about using AI is also malice.

We see a typical issue in modern online media: The policy is to not use AI, but he demands of content created per day makes it very difficult to not use AI... so the end result is undisclosed AI. This is all over the old blogosphere publications, regardless of who owns them. The ad revenue per article is just not great

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#56

Post by icegreentea2 »

maxbond wrote: post #52
g947o wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.

No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility. If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.

Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf".

If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#57

Post by andrewflnr »

maxbond wrote: post #47
andrewflnr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying is intent to deceive. Deception is harm. This is not complicated.

I think you're reading a lot of intentionality into the situation what may be present, but I have not seen information confirming or really even suggesting that it is. Did someone challenge them, "was AI used in the creation of this article?" and they denied it? I see no evidence of that. Seems like ordinary, everyday corner cutting to me. I don't think that rises to the level of malice. Maybe if we go through their…

> 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.

By submitting this work they warranted that it was their own. Requiring an explicit false statement to qualify as a lie excludes many of the most harmful cases of deception.

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#59

Post by anonymous908213 »

maxbond wrote: post #39
anonymous908213 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article in question appears to me to be written by a human (excluding what's in quotation marks), but of course neither of us has a crystal ball. Are there particular parts of it that you would flag as generated? 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…

I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era.

I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a political journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to their readers to report facts.

Re: Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

#60

Post by maxbond »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #56
maxbond wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility. If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.

Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf". If they felt t…

You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else.

What would you have liked to see them announce?

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