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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

#51

Post by th0ma5 »

sparky_z wrote: post #48
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".

[dead]

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

#52

Post by dang »

kittikitti wrote: post #43
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but I don't follow

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

#53

Post by croes »

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 will cycle.

Without the content site the AI overview will become useless

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

#54

Post by gdulli »

zarflax wrote: post #47
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.

"Who are you, and how did you lose your job?"

"I'm an AI reporter. And, I'm an AI reporter."

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

#55

Post by breput »

As much as I respect the site and gladly financially support it, this is ultimately a failure on Ars Technica and its editors. If there are any.

If this were just some random blogger, then yes the blame is totally theirs. But this was published under the Ars Technica masthead and there should have been someone or something double checking the veracity of the contents.

That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that are among the best in their fields: Eric Burger, Dan Goodin, Beth Mole, Stephen Clark, and Andrew Cunningham amongst many, so one f'up shouldn't really impugn the entire organization.

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

#56

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

jackyli02 wrote: post #22

The role "reporter" deserves very little credence in AI now. The public might be better off if they get their information on AI from ChatGPT.

The core story is literally about how AI made up facts. The solution is more of the same?

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

#57

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

you're participating in a social media site where something like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do something and write this article about it." So put your money where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.

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

#58

Post by Marsymars »

slg wrote: post #33
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 require…

Yeah, consider the same thing in other domains - e.g. say you're doing some code review and the PR author is a cowoker you've had for years, and they include a comment with a link to some canonical documentation along with a verbatim quote from said doc explaining usage of something in the PR. If the quote and usage both make sense in the context, I'm not going to be habitually clicking through to the docs to verify that the quote isn't actually fabricated.

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

#60

Post by Marsymars »

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?

In defense of that, his writing style was basically the same long before LLMs.
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