Submitted 1 month ago by fubarx@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fires-reporter-ai-quotes
I’m not taking all the credit but I do hope those people who didn’t believe me in the past could rightfully take this comment, print it, pull down their pants and shove it up their ass.
It’s time to hold journalism with a higher standard and this idea that “well they do alright” and “it was only once” is bullshit sliding into madness.
Just the facts, folks.
The problem with your attitude towards this is that these companies are forcing “AI” down everyone’s throat. It’s a requirement now to churn out more bullshit than humanly possible.
This person was simply fired because they didn’t catch the false information,not because they used the tools forced upon them.
I don’t work at Ars, and maybe you know something I don’t, but I have seen nothing to suggest that they’re one of the companies doing that. It seems like they are pretty open about how they do not allow AI to be used in the process. Have they said something to indicate otherwise and I just misssed it?
Sifting through information to find out what’s true and what’s not, before presenting it to the public, is a pretty crucial task and ability for an actual journalist though. It is probably one of the most important parts of their job to verify the correctness of their sources and what they write.
Absolutely not. Ars has a no AI policy, it’s the exact opposite. Guessing you are a nice little bot.
Main character moment.
and “it was only once” is bullshit
They checked and then fired the author. I don’t see how this is “it was only once” implying nothing changed and it will happen again. Isn’t firing the author “holding journalism to a higher standard” already, which you ask for?
Maybe they should do more than just fire a person who was caught using AI. Maybe they should establish a process of independent fact checking before publication, regardless of whether AI was known or intended to be used to produce the article. It is a problem that AI was used in a way that introduced factual errors. It’s fair that the person responsible for this was fired. But all processes need quality control. Why hasn’t the person who failed to wrap quality control processes around the author fired?
Whoa. There are actually consequences? ArsTechnica is actually sorry??
No, the worker was fired and the executive whose job title is making sure that the work submitted is correct was not fired.
The executives will get a bonus this year.
Copy editing won’t be an executive’s job. But yeah, they didn’t do the bare minimum which is concerning, it seems to indicate that they may not do the bare minimum on all of their articles. How much stuff went undiscovered?
I’m not going to outright say that journalist shouldn’t use AI to write articles, because it’s basically an enforceable rule, but there should be someone at some point whose ultimate responsibility is to make sure that the articles are at least factual, whether they were written by a human or not. Determining whether a quote is legitimate is pretty easy, you just have to Google the quote, if you can’t find any other sources you start to ask questions. As I said it’s the bare minimum they could have done.
The executives will get a bonus this year.
well of course! they just saved a lot of money on wages, they deserve it!
I think the executive in question is Kyle Orland, who I don’t know personally but I’ve interacted with sometimes. He’s pretty good! Again, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, maybe I’m too close. I’ve never worked for either of them, but I’ve encountered them on social media from time to time. I think I interacted with Kyle concerning a Storybundle book once.
only if it goes viral
“futurism has confirmed”. Later on the article: “reached out to three parties, no replies and no comment”.
Huh? So how did they confirm?
Obviously the use of a LLM was a terrible decision, but I think in this context we can also blame some country’s lack of sick pay.
“I ain’t never said no such thing” - Albert Einstein
I would fire them and borrow them from ever working in journalism ever again
I’ve interacted with Benj Edwards on social media for some time. He’s done lots of good work! He’s on (or maybe used to be on) Mastodon and Bluesky. He runs Vintage Computing and Gaming, and has written good articles for several prominent places. I’ve said as much in multiple forums, I feel like I’ve maybe been going on a crusade.
I haven’t seen many others defending him. I’m really torn up over this. They had a weak moment. They were sick (I mean, literally.). A few other people, notably Cory Doctorow and Paul Ford, have written LLM-defending places. And the AI hype has been deafening.
It’s amazing though, that so soon after he used AI, that it immediately hallucinated something job-ending. I knew it was really bad, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad. You get the sense, with so many people talking positively about it, that the hallucinations must be something that happens, what, maybe 5% of the time?
To me, it seems like the kind of mistake that he should be able to apologize for, promise not to do it again, and move on. But we’ve all had our good will taken advantage of for so long by malicious actors, like how Gamergate was used as a wedge to push loathsome politics onto a legion of young males. It feels like we can’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt any more.
I don’t know. I know I’m influenced by all the good work he’s done. I feel like that shouldn’t all be thrown away.
5% of the time? LLMs, from their own perspective, are only capable of hallucinating. There’s no difference in what they’re doing between cases we call “hallucinating” and “correct.” It’s the same process.
Cory Doctorow … have written LLM-defending places.
citation requested because everything I’ve seen is opposed
why the fuck wouldn’t a journalist double check the things that the AI is feeding to him? in what universe is this even considered journalism?
AI - damned if you do and damned if you don’t. And it’s not just journalism affected.
What was the damned if you don’t in this scenario? Seems more like damned if do, best if you don’t in this situation.
Best if you don’t if quality is more important than financial viability, but no one can compete financially with the flood of AI/LLM being given away for free or, at most, far below actual cost. It’s not good for anyone but the billionaires, but have you noticed how much wealth they have accumulated in the past few years? It’s very, very good for them.
I don’t know but implication the other poster is making is “a human can write 2 articles, a Ai can write 5, I’m being asked for 5 which is impossible. I can use Ai and risk trusting it or not meet my required outputs and also get fired.”
I made up those numbers but that’s the accusation. You are damned if you use the Ai to meet your goals. You are damned if you don’t meet your goals.
Or, you know, double-check that the quotes given to you by the experimental AI “quote extractor” tool are accurate?
He is (was) their go-to AI reporter. It’s not like they handed the assignment to an intern and said “go nuts.”
And the article was about AI fabricating an attack on a developer that rejected its PR.
The whole point of using AI is that its a search tool and that is the verification.
Otherwise there’s no point in using it.
And you can guarantee Conde Nast demands journalists use AI all the time.
I have yet to see a field where LLMs are a net positive. At best scammers can dupe people easier and faster than ever but between writing, programming, etc the avg productivity gain is typically negligible at best to achieve work of similar quality with or without LLMs.
It is useful in some specific fields like protein folding:
www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
The problem is people think it can replace people which is wrong, it is a tool and should be used as such not as a replacement.
Why are we blaming AI here instead of the journalist?
I mean they fired the guy, and the guy took full responsibility for the errors. If that’s not blaming the journalist, I don’t know what is.
Tbf, I didn’t read the article. But the title mentions “controversy.” Also are people so lazy they can’t make up their own fake quotes? Was AI really needed here?
As they should
Maybe they heared @latenightlinux@mastodon.social
deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Controversy… What controversy? It sounds more like blatant journalistic malpractice
Khanzarate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A few years ago, blatant journalistic malpractice was a controversy.
protist@mander.xyz 1 month ago
That’s why he was fired
deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
The article says “controversy” as of this is some cancel culture crap.
artyom@piefed.social 1 month ago
When I suggested he be fired on another thread I received several responses saying “he made a mistake” and “he was sick”, and many downvotes in return.
XLE@piefed.social 1 month ago
The comments here around this were so… Off. I guess nothing was certain, but we were supposed to believe that the author was too sick to write an article, but also writing an article and using an AI “tool” at the same time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but popular defenses at the time were
totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
I did not downvote you—my instance does not allow or show downvotes, which is really nice!—but he was sick, and he did make a mistake, and him being fired does not make either of those things false.
Also, a ton of people were piling on him in that thread, so you had plenty of company in calling him to be fired.
deltaspawn0040@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Amazing. Just great.
Imagine being confronted for lying and just going “hey it was an accident okay I didn’t MEAN to decieve people, I just used the machine known for deceiving people and willingly put my name on its deceptions and it deceived people!” and having people defend you.