641–650 of 670 posts
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
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Some companies have enough of a track record that they should be nuked from orbit, and "Company bad" is all that is worth saying. Meta is one of those companies. Palantir is another. Not holding them accountable and acting as if we should continue engaging with their products is part of the reason we are rapidly sliding towards dystopia
Thanks for affirming that ignoring Ars comment section and Ars in general was a good decision -- I can stop wasting time seeing comments like yours.
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Your window might be fogged up.
You might consider dispensing with the analogy and tell me in clear language. I don't know exactly what your objection is.
Alice says it's raining. Bob says it's sunny. It's raining. The news says that it's raining. Is it bias? Should the news say that it might be raining or sunny?
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I don't think you get to be this snarky about helping people understand things, when your initial contribution was to read "it's all hands over the holiday weekend time" and reply by saying it's a holiday weekend.
They did a stealth edit to not look as foolish. They didn't mention the holiday or weekend in what I replied to originally. That's why I snapped back with snark.
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They did a stealth edit to not look as foolish. They didn't mention the holiday or weekend in what I replied to originally. That's why I snapped back with snark.
Oh, and then they basically lied about it? That sucks.
It highlights why having human oversight in the loop matters - whether it's content review, action approval, or just sanity-checking outputs before they go live. The best AI assistant setups I've seen treat the AI as a capable but supervised collaborator, not a fully autonomous actor.
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You might consider dispensing with the analogy and tell me in clear language. I don't know exactly what your objection is.
Bias has nothing to do with which "side" is discussed more. Bias has everything to do with whether the discussion reflects the truth. Was the weather analogy not clear enough? Alice says it's raining. Bob says it's sunny. It's raining. The news says that it's raining. Is it bias? Should the news say that it might be raining or sunny?
Or is the sunny argument recognising that murdering protesters instead of detaining them is not good policy?
Current response from one of the more senior Ars folk: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... (Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
And the original article has now been replaced with a brief paragraph on the retraction.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...
Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.
Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…
I doubt, by and large, that it's the same people. Just as this LLM misquoting is journalistic malpractice, "don't look at the code anymore" is engineering malpractice.
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You seem to be quite certain that I had not read the article, yet I distinctly remember doing do. By what proceess do you imagine I arrived at the conclusion that the article suggested that published quotes were LLM hallucinations when that was not mentioned in the article title? You accuse me of performative skepticism, yet all I think is that it is better to have evidence over assumptions, and it is better to ask i…
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
>On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.