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Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

theguardian.com

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Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#61

Post by jacquesm »

WarmWash wrote: post #52
crop_rotation wrote: post #23

HN is full of people saying ABCD should know better and honestly I thought the same, but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly. People get defensive when I point out out to them that ChatGPT will make things up and it is widely know, and some even tell me it is the fault of "tech people"…

Every single person, every one of them, that I have watched google something since AI overviews launched, will instantly reference the AI overview. And that model is some bottom-rung high volume model, not even gemini.

The best way to deal with that is to kick the AI overview off using your browser.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#62

Post by jacquesm »

andrewflnr wrote: post #45
crop_rotation wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the world should be utopia and everyone should be happy and we all wish for world peace and yada yada yada. What you are saying is a vision of ideal world as it should be, but doesn't help anyone understand the real world problems.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable . That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

I would happily bet that you too have fallen for this at least once. Unless you cut AI out of your life completely and do not interact with others.

AI output is like that COVID video of contamination, you almost can't avoid it unless you scrupulously check each and every thing that is presented as fact that you are exposed to. And absolutely nobody does that.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#63

Post by coffeefirst »

andrewflnr wrote: post #37
crop_rotation wrote: post #23

HN is full of people saying ABCD should know better and honestly I thought the same, but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly. People get defensive when I point out out to them that ChatGPT will make things up and it is widely know, and some even tell me it is the fault of "tech people"…

Your friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.

This answer really isn’t good enough. The providers can’t both aim to replace search and claim PhD level intelligence that will do all the jobs, but hide behind “it makes mistakes” in small print.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#64

Post by tobr »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #53
tobr wrote: post #41

Interesting to note how similar this seems to what happened with Benj Edwards at Ars Technica. AI was used to extract or summarize information, and quotes found in the summary were then used as source material for the final writing and never double checked against the actual source. I’ve run into a similar problem myself - working with a big transcript, I asked an AI to pull out passages that related to a certain top…

This seems like a solved problem. Any RAG interface I design I have links to the original source and passage. Even NotebookLM does this.

It might be a solved problem in the sense that it has a possible solution, but not in the sense that it doesn’t happen with the tools most people would expect to be able to handle the task.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#65

Post by PeterStuer »

hvb2 wrote: post #49
PeterStuer wrote: post #7

"Journalism" over here seems to have died a long time ago. Most if not all of the former "quality newspapers" unfortunately seem to have devolved into what could be more accurately described as "pro regime activist blogs".

If by "over here" you mean the US, that sounds about right. Can be summed up succinctly into "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

EU is actually just as bad

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#66

Post by andrewflnr »

coffeefirst wrote: post #63
andrewflnr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.

This answer really isn’t good enough. The providers can’t both aim to replace search and claim PhD level intelligence that will do all the jobs, but hide behind “it makes mistakes” in small print.

I'm not making excuses for the providers either. But seeing through the inflated claims of commercial service providers is not a new skill.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#67

Post by andrewflnr »

ffsm8 wrote: post #51
andrewflnr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable . That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

You're seriously overestimating the average person's ability to understand what llms are. Look at all the influences, streamers, podcasters constantly asking em things and taking it as fact - live. Isn't the joe Rogan experience like the most watched podcast or something? Every episode I've ever stumbled upon he "fact checks" multiple things via their sponsor which is just an llm provider specialized on news. People…

You don't need to know how an LLM works to realize "sometimes the magic ChatGPT box tells me wrong things". Even if you fully fall for the anthropomorphism, this only requires the same level of awareness as realizing that after the third or fourth thing your weird uncle tells you that turns out not to be true, maybe you shouldn't take him at his word.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#68

Post by andrewflnr »

jacquesm wrote: post #62
andrewflnr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable . That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

I would happily bet that you too have fallen for this at least once. Unless you cut AI out of your life completely and do not interact with others. AI output is like that COVID video of contamination, you almost can't avoid it unless you scrupulously check each and every thing that is presented as fact that you are exposed to. And absolutely nobody does that.

> Unless you cut AI out of your life completely

Pretty close. I only touched ChatGPT a couple times a few years ago, haven't used the others (on purpose at least. Google forces its Gemini summaries on me but I mostly avoid them, because, umm, see above.)

> and do not interact with others.

Most people I interact with are on the same page about AI. But I try to keep my critical thinking online anyway, like I always have. If someone tried to feed me AI slop, I would consider that person to have betrayed my trust and would, to put it gently, try to interact with them less.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#69

Post by andrewflnr »

philipov wrote: post #59
andrewflnr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't seriously compare the problem of world peace with the problem of exercising the most basic level of critical thinking w.r.t. LLM output after it has already proven itself unreliable . That's not a utopian dream, it's a level of prudence on par with not sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

You may demand that of yourself, but for others we must design around the fact that they are stupid. You do not have the power to change their stupidity, only your response to it.

Indeed. I'm not sure why you think that's responsive to my post. I'm mostly pointing out just how deeply stupid they are.

Though if you have a useful response besides "weather the storm while everyone else learns the hard way", I'm listening.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#70

Post by array_key_first »

andrewflnr wrote: post #43
sigseg1v wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the getting stranded example different than asking on a travel forum how to get somewhere, and an active and well intentioned user that isn't familiar with your area of travel answers, gives you wrong instructions, and you get lost?

The key missing step is where the traveler exercises critical thinking and checks the advice they get. Some people seem to turn that off for LLMs.

It's because we spent that last 50 years training people that computers are algorithmic, cold, and don't make human mistakes. Your calculator can't tell you the meaning of life, but it will never get 2 + 2 wrong.

Well, now the calculator can tell you a meaning of life, but it'll get 2 + 2 wrong 10% of the time.

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