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Our newsroom AI policy

arstechnica.com

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Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#71

Post by nemomarx »

bombcar wrote: post #65
nemomarx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars has a decently pricey direct subscription, doesn't it? With a lot of tech focused features included. Their strategy is probably the best you could set up in this ecosystem.

If it isn't clear from this policy that Ars is run by the advertisers and not the subscribers, I don't know what would make it clear. Advertisers only care about eyeballs and really bad press; AI increases the first and rarely causes the second.

My more cynical take is that this might be as subscriber driven as it's possible for a news outlet now. Keep an eye on 404 and see if they can resist the gravity of ads, I guess?

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#73

Post by beepbooptheory »

madamelic wrote: post #67
meander_water wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most labs actively create synthetic data using existing model as part of the mix for the pretraining stage for their next model. Would love to know exactly what the latest process is to keep slop out of training data.

I think everyone overblows the whole "AI is poisoning AI!" thing. It could be a problem but the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers... I am not sold. If I was choosing what to 'feed' AI, I wouldn't even bother with textual social media (besides Github / Gitlab /…

You can put it in scare quotes all you want, doesn't stop you from sounding like Scrooge McDuck.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#74

Post by vintagedave »

intended wrote: post #33
vintagedave wrote: post #6

> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very et…

>This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team. We depended on an ecosystem of news and journalism to keep our polities informed. However, if that ecosystem is starving it will increasingly fail to live up to its standards and we can expect these failures to impact us increasingly. I am not defending bad journalists, nor creating an excuse to tolerate such behavior in the future.…

I agree with you; what I am noting is that traditional journalism ethics (editors are responsible for fact checking) is explicitly refused by this policy.

They can simultaneously set standards for their staff -- as they should -- and retain professional standards for the more senior staff as well.

To remove responsibility from those more senior and make those more junior the only ones responsible is in any company a serious professional issue. Here it is also specifically contrary to the professional standards in their business area.

I see my parent comment is downvoted. Yet, this is firmly the ethical and professional and traditional stance. I don't believe AI or any random upcoming technology should change this.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#75

Post by troyvit »

legitster wrote: post #4

AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when askin…

> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.

As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#76

Post by vintagedave »

lynx97 wrote: post #9
vintagedave wrote: post #6

> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very et…

> apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes "Apparently sick", you couldn't phrase it more accurately. Kudos for firing them, the only valid course of action for a publisher.

That's harsh. I feel any situation where someone is ill and required to work (the appearance, which is a labour issue if true), and makes mistakes while sick, should be treated with a little kindness. I worry they were made an example of.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#77

Post by inquirerGeneral »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #8

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very r…

[dead]

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#78

Post by palmotea »

madamelic wrote: post #67
meander_water wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most labs actively create synthetic data using existing model as part of the mix for the pretraining stage for their next model. Would love to know exactly what the latest process is to keep slop out of training data.

I think everyone overblows the whole "AI is poisoning AI!" thing. It could be a problem but the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers... I am not sold. If I was choosing what to 'feed' AI, I wouldn't even bother with textual social media (besides Github / Gitlab /…

> the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers...

> ...

> scraping books, and other sources that aren't "unwashed masses saying whatever they want".

The problem is there's a lot of knowledge that only exists as reddit comments, blog posts, or social Q&A.

Re: Our newsroom AI policy

#80

Post by palmotea »

intended wrote: post #32
legitster wrote: post #4

AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when askin…

> in danger It has already done so, and we can be confident in saying that. Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content. Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. Theres jokes about GenAI being the great filter; while I doubt this, I do hope this is th…

> Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content....

> Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption.

AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to drop on verified content, you'll be served prolefeed slop and be that much more ignorant.

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