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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

#81
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…

This has just happened - i'm giving Ars a bit more time to come out with a piece examining the situation. They're a pretty good operation, I think. but it they don't...

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

#82

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.

I have seen it be utterly wrong so many times recently I'm considering permanently hiding it. For instance, googling for "Amiga twin stick games" it listed a number of old, top-down, very much single axis games like Alien Breed as examples.

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

#83
post #29

Context from earlier discussion of the article being pulled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

Thanks! and indeed - here's the sequence (in the usual reverse order). If there are missing threads we can add them... An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145 - Feb 2026 (501 comments) OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments) An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fal…

dang, we appreciate all you do. thanks

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue. I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a…

All they had to do was write a clear and simple message saying that one of their staff was responsible, has been fired, and they'll take steps to avoid this in future. Their actions so far just make me think they're panicking and found a scapegoat to blame it on, but they're not going to put any new checks in place so it'll just happen again.

It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that.

I feel bad for the guy, but there's just no way I can imagine much better safeguards other than editors paying more close attention to referencing sources, and hiring more reliable people.

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

#86
post #28

The crazy part to me is that even here on HN there are people who still insist that LLMs don't fabricate things or otherwise lie. I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business. Sure there is such a thing as a naysayer but there are also people think all forms of valid criticism…

>I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business.

NFT protocol doesnt really care what the payload is. NFT purveyors likewise dont care what their payload is, as long as they could use the term "NFT".

NFT's are great for certain use cases (Crypto Kitties is still around I believe) but there was never a single moment I considered that owning a weird ape jpeg, even if it was somehow, properly owned by me, would be worth millions of dollars or whatever. Its like trying to sell a "TCP".

That said, future blockchain applications will probably still rely on NFT's in some fashion. Just not the protocol as product weirdness we got for a few years there.

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

#87
I guess Blameless Postmortems haven't arrived in journalism yet.

Pretty weird that journalism as a business still revolves around "we hired a guy to write a thing, and he's perfect. oh wait, he's not perfect? it was all his fault. we've hired a new perfect guy, so everything's good now." My dudes... there are many ways you can vet information before publishing it. I get that the business is all about "being first", but that also seems to imply "being the first to be wrong".

I feel bad for the reporters. People seem to be piling onto them like they're supposed to be superhuman, but actually they're normal people under intense pressure. People fail, it's human. But when an organization fails, it's a failure of many people, not one.

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

#88

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.

I know people love to hate on the AI overviews, and I'm a person who generally hates both google and AI. But--I see them as basically good and ideal. After all most of the time I am googling something like trivial, like a simple fact. And for the last decade when I have to click into sites for the information it's some SEO spam-ridden garbage site. So I am very glad to not have to interact with those anymore.

Of course Google gets little credit for this since it was their own malfeasance that led to all the SEO spam anyway (and the horrible expertsexchange-quality tech information, and stupid recipe sites that put life stories first)... but at least there now there is a backpressure against some of the spammy crap.

I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying? Or more likely applying some serious negative bias to the pattern they're reporting. The overviews are wrong sometimes, yes, but surely it is like 10% of the time, not always. Probably they're biased because they're generally mad at google, or AI being shoved in their face in general, and I get that... but you don't make the case against google/AI stronger by misrepresenting it; it is a stronger argument if it's accurate and resonates with everyones' experiences.

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

#89
I'm very bad with names and quotes, so sometimes I'll ask ChatGPT something like "what's that famous quote Brian Kernighan said about programming language names" and it will just make shit up, when really I was thinking about Donald Knuth. But according to ChatGPT, Kernighan famously said:

  “Everyone knows that Perl is designed to make easy things easy, and hard things possible, but nobody knows why it’s called Perl.”
Which of course returns 0 results on Google, as is customary for famous quotes.

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

#90

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.

> 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.

It says things I know to be false fairly regularly. I don't keep a log or anything, but it's left an impression that it's far from reliable.

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