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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

kibwen wrote: post #32
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?

Because the vast and overwhelmingly majority of the time, if you ask a question into the ether that nobody has a good answer to, most people will gloss over it and not bother answering, as attested by decades of relatable memes ( https://xkcd.com/979/ ). In contrast, the chatbot is trained to always attempt to give an answer, and is seemingly disincentivized via its training set to just shrug and say "I don't know, g…

[deleted]

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#72

Post by dijksterhuis »

sigseg1v wrote: post #25
camillomiller wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CTO sent me a message that opened with: “Here’s a friendly message that will perfectly convey what you want to say”. A double PhD friend says she has to talk to chatGPT for all sort of advice and can’t feel safe not doing it, “because you know I’m single and don’t have a companion to spitball my ideas”. She let chatGPT decide which way to take to get to a certain island, and she got stranded because the suggested s…

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?

cunningham's law [0] [1] increases the likelihood that at least one other person will point out the error and correct it. chances are you'll probably get more than one person posting.

LLMs don't do this. they give confident language output, not correct answers.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

[1]: https://xkcd.com/386/

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#73

Post by ben_w »

andrewflnr wrote: post #67
ffsm8 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If human psychology worked like that, lotteries wouldn't be a thing. Nor prayer. There wouldn't be horoscopes in newspapers, nor homeopathy.

One of the various oddities going on with LLMs in particular is them being trained with feedback from users having a chance to upvote or downvote responses, or A/B test which of two is "better". This naturally leads to things which are more convincing, though this only loosely correlates to "more correct".

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#74

Post by andrewflnr »

ben_w wrote: post #73
andrewflnr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If human psychology worked like that, lotteries wouldn't be a thing. Nor prayer. There wouldn't be horoscopes in newspapers, nor homeopathy. One of the various oddities going on with LLMs in particular is them being trained with feedback from users having a chance to upvote or downvote responses, or A/B test which of two is "better". This naturally leads to things which are more convincing, though this only loosely c…

No shit. Why do people in this thread keep telling me that people are stupid like that's a news flash to me? The fact remains that it is stupid, and especially for educated people like the laywers/doctors/etc mentioned upthread, it's sufficiently obvious stupidity that there's no excuse. Yes, I know, that describes a lot of other stupidity. Much of our history as a species is inexcusable.

Edit: though I should be clear: people demonstrably do often learn to discount obviously unreliable sources. Not all the time, but pretty often in the easily verifiable cases, especially where they don't have a major emotional stake.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#75

Post by coffeefirst »

andrewflnr wrote: post #66
coffeefirst wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, and fair. But there also seems to be something about these that really seems to throw off otherwise skeptical people.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#76

Post by jacquesm »

andrewflnr wrote: post #68
jacquesm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

That makes you an extremely rare exception. I use AI as a private tutor on various subjects that interest me to save time and not to have to watch hours of low content videos. But I've separated it out to the degree that I'm running that stuff on a separate laptop to make sure my work product is never going to be contaminated. I quite literally treat it as though it is radio active and should never touch the rest of what I do.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#77

Post by andrewflnr »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
andrewflnr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hav…

That makes you an extremely rare exception. I use AI as a private tutor on various subjects that interest me to save time and not to have to watch hours of low content videos. But I've separated it out to the degree that I'm running that stuff on a separate laptop to make sure my work product is never going to be contaminated. I quite literally treat it as though it is radio active and should never touch the rest of…

> That makes you an extremely rare exception.

Well, thanks, I guess.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#78

Post by nothrabannosir »

hvb2 wrote: post #47
nothrabannosir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact. Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.” English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.” I’d say the only difference is the em dash. Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.

I'm not disagreeing it's a bad translation. Just saying that it's not the source

I mean that whatever signal you think you get from the sentence structure was not introduced by (potentially) automated translation. The sentence structure is precisely the same in the original Dutch.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#79

Post by rsynnott »

microtonal wrote: post #39
rsynnott wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particularly given that the dreaded em-dash is not commonly used in Irish or UK English; it’s mostly a US English thing.

The original (?) apology in Dutch does not use em-dashes: https://steady.page/en/journalistiekondervuur/posts/dd6e066f...

Oh, I had completely missed that he’d done this in a Dutch paper too. All I’d heard of it previously was that his articles had been pulled by the Irish Independent, so I was expecting the apology to be in English.

Re: Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes

#80

Post by clydethefrog »

microtonal wrote: post #38
ashwinnair99 wrote: post #19

The tool didn't fail here, the person did. An experienced journalist should know better. Editorial review exists for exactly this reason, if you skip it, this is what happens.

But the article said he published it in his own Substack newsletter, I am assuming that it is not under editorial control, since it is personal?

Some of these newsletters were also edited and published in opinion pages of the Mediahuis publications.
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