[HN Gopher] Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy inv...
___________________________________________________________________
Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving
fabricated quotes
Author : danso
Score : 556 points
Date : 2026-03-03 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futurism.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futurism.com)
| ab_testing wrote:
| So they fired that author after the author had publicly
| apologized on Blue sky.
| coldtea wrote:
| "Apologized on Blue Sky" is absolutely no reason to keep them.
| The author did the absolutely worst things a journalist can do
| (short of actual corruption) and is unfit for the job:
|
| - He didn't care for his story,
|
| - he didn't care to verify his story,
|
| - he published bullshit made up stuff,
|
| - and put words in a real person's mouth
|
| - and he didn't even care to write the thing himself
|
| Why keep him and pay him? What mentality all the above show?
| What respect, both self respect and respect for the job?
|
| If they wanted stories from an LLM, they can pay for a
| subscription to one directly.
|
| Hope this sends a message to journalist hacks who offload their
| writing or research to an LLM.
| bingaweek wrote:
| What is the connection between these two statements? Are we
| supposed to presume that someone who apologizes on Bluesky
| should never be fired? Or did you also read the article and
| thought this was important information?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Can you name any other way for Ars Technica to handle this
| situation without permanently soiling their reputation?
| Marsymars wrote:
| That's the thing. I feel kinda bad for Benj, I don't wish him
| ill, and maybe he keeps writing on his own site and/or other
| places, but I don't see any way that he could have kept
| writing for Ars.
| somenameforme wrote:
| He was supposed to be their "Senior AI Reporter." Him including
| basically anything from LLMs, without verifying it, in articles
| not only demonstrates a complete lack of credibility as a
| writer, but also a complete lack of understanding of AI. Even
| if they might have personally wanted to keep him on, you just
| can't after something like this.
| danso wrote:
| Why would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude
| you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?
| skygazer wrote:
| Is it "plagiarism" to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not
| that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren't
| taken, but plagiarism doesn't seem like the right word, as
| quotes are almost definitionally not plagiarism. But maybe
| these were paraphrasings masquerading as quotes, so maybe
| that's the difference.
| gdulli wrote:
| "Slop" and "hallucinate" have meanings outside of AI too,
| but it's easier to repurpose existing words than come up
| with a whole new lexicon for AI failure modes.
| netsharc wrote:
| Groan, redefining "plagiarism" to add "inventing quotes"
| is a stupidity too far for me.
|
| Making up quotes and attributing them to people has
| happened before AI, journalists proper and pretend have
| done it too.
| smallerize wrote:
| Maybe it's plagiarism because he did not attribute the LLM
| output to the LLM.
| danso wrote:
| Yeah, it's the lack of attribution that is key, even if
| it sounds like a trivial and ceremonial step. If a New
| York Times reporter writes _" 'Our investigation has
| completely stalled,' Kings County Sheriff Bob Jones told
| the Springfield Observer"_, I can infer that the NYT is
| reliant on local reporting for this story and may not
| have done original on-the-ground work themselves.
|
| Imagine how flimsy Ars' story about a blog post would
| look like if the story had correctly attributed the
| quotes (fabricated or not) to, "according to Claude AI's
| analysis of the blog post". The reader would have the
| right to wonder if the reporter had even read the blog
| post.
| danso wrote:
| Plagiarism hurts not only the original author (in this
| case, I don't think we have to worry about the LLM), but
| also the reporter's audience, who has an expectation that
| the writer's reporting and analysis are original and based
| on the writer's own research and observations. At the very
| least it's a theft of the reader's time, if I wanted an
| LLM's perspective on a topic, I'd generate it myself
|
| One of the things left unsaid in Edwards's apology [0] was
| whether he read the blog post that is the entire raison
| d'etre of his story. It's not like the story purported to
| do anything other than incorporate publish blog posts. So
| in his overworked and sickened state, how did trying out an
| "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool" substantially save
| him time versus jotting notes while ostensibly reading the
| source material himself
|
| [0]
| https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
| bandrami wrote:
| That absolutely should be career-ending for a journalist,
| apology or no
| etchalon wrote:
| Not "career-ending" but definitely back a few paces.
|
| This wasn't outright fabrication, it was a sloppy editorial
| workflow that resulted in hallucinations being published as
| fast (which is absolutely going to be get more and more
| common unless newsrooms develop specific guards against it).
| landl0rd wrote:
| The raison d'etre for the journalist, in AD 2026, is less to
| gather information than to verify it. The journalist who cannot
| be trusted is no journalist at all. He is a blogger.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > senior AI reporter
|
| A true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM
| output than anyone else.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I think that's the nail in the coffin. Most others could say it
| was a giant whoopsie, but here it goes to the heart of their
| credibility. How could they continue write authoritatively
| about AI, having done this.
| amarant wrote:
| I dunno. If AI _doesn 't_ write your articles, are you even an
| AI reporter?
|
| Sorry, I never could resist a good dad joke
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| So the original blogger got slandered by an LLM agent, then got
| slandered again by a human journalist who used an LLM agent to
| write the article about him getting slandered by an LLM agent?
| How ironic.
|
| But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or
| once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically
| slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the
| journalist? New questions for the new agentic society.
| amstan wrote:
| 4 times, you forgot the owner of the bot that did the PR.
| Revanche1367 wrote:
| Indeed, you're right.
| zarflax wrote:
| No, the journalist came in and slandered the LLM Twice and Jim
| Fell.
| gdulli wrote:
| "Who are you, and how did you lose your job?"
|
| "I'm an AI reporter. And, I'm an AI reporter."
| sparky_z wrote:
| He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica
| article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as
| direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting.
| But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander
| isn't just a synonym of "lie".
| lostmsu wrote:
| Wait, in what way the original blogger got slandered by an LLM
| agent?
| sparky_z wrote:
| It literally wrote a blog post [supposedly on its own
| initiative] trying to gin up outrage at open source
| maintainer after he denied the LLM's pull request.
|
| Here's the original write-up of the incident:
|
| https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-
| on...
| lostmsu wrote:
| And which part of that blog post is slander?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "Edwards also stressed that his colleague Kyle Orland, the site's
| senior gaming editor who co-bylined the retracted story, had 'no
| role in this error.'"
|
| Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing
| fraudulent quotes.
| schiffern wrote:
| "I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best
| of my knowledge at the time a story is published."
|
| Nothing suspicious about heavy use of qualifiers in a non-
| apology blanket denial. Where's the Polymarket for whether this
| guy has a job next month?
|
| https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _whether this guy has a job next month?_
|
| That's a problem. If he really hasn't apologized, neither he
| nor _Ars_ have recognized there is a problem, which means it
| will happen again.
| slg wrote:
| Is there something to the story that I'm missing? Why does
| Orland need to apologize? Edwards fabricated the quotes via
| AI and seemingly presented them to Orland as authentic.
| Orland had no reason to suspect the quotes weren't real
| until after publishing.
|
| When journalists are working on a shared byline, they don't
| each do the same research in order to fact-check each
| other. There is inherently a level of trust required for
| collaborating like this and Edwards violated that trust.
|
| You can say this is a failure by the editorial process for
| not including fact checking, but that is an organizational
| issue with Ars, it's not the fault of Orland for failing to
| duplicate the work that he believed his coauthor did.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Yeah, consider the same thing in other domains - e.g. say
| you're doing some code review and the PR author is a
| cowoker you've had for years, and they include a comment
| with a link to some canonical documentation along with a
| verbatim quote from said doc explaining usage of
| something in the PR. If the quote and usage both make
| sense in the context, I'm not going to be habitually
| clicking through to the docs to verify that the quote
| isn't actually fabricated.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why does Orland need to apologize? Edwards fabricated
| the quotes_
|
| He's on the byline and he's an editor.
|
| > _they don 't each do the same research in order to
| fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of
| trust_
|
| If we're going to excuse this, what does the byline mean?
| He trusted the wrong person. It would be like if a source
| lied to him. Not the end of the world. But absolutely
| credibility destroying if instead of an apology you get a
| word salad.
|
| > _You can say this is a failure by the editorial
| process_
|
| Orland is _also_ an editor. (Senior gaming editor [1].)
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/author/kyle-orland/
| slg wrote:
| Having a byline on a piece is not an indication he edited
| the piece, in fact, it's an indication he didn't edit it.
| That byline is simply an indication that he was one of
| two people responsible for writing the piece. He
| obviously didn't write every line or else there wouldn't
| be a second byline.
|
| There is also a huge difference between trusting a
| coworker and falling for a lie of a source. Journalists
| deal with sources with a certain level of skepticism that
| just isn't productive or conducive to being a good
| coworker. Have you ever dealt with a coworker who didn't
| trust people to do their jobs? It's incredibly
| offputting.
|
| I'll also point out that I said blame the "editorial
| process", that isn't the same as blaming an individual
| editor. This type of basic fact checking is either funded
| by the business or it isn't. This is very unlikely to be
| a failure of an individual rather than an absence of
| fact-checking at all and the decision for that is very
| unlikely to be made by the "senior gaming editor" (and it
| should be noted this wasn't even a gaming story).
|
| There seems to be a disconnect between the way journalism
| generally works and your expectations for how it works. I
| believe Orland got duped by behaving the way most
| journalists would in a system that is less able to catch
| issues like this due to general industry cutbacks.
| sl0pmaestro wrote:
| > while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep," he
| "unintentionally made a serious journalistic error" as he
| attempted to use an "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool" to
| help him
|
| Oh right, being ill is what caused the error. I can bet that if
| you start verifying the past content from this author, you will
| see similar AI slop. Either that or he has been always ill with
| very little sleep.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Context from earlier discussion of the article being pulled:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
| dang wrote:
| 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
| Fallout_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb
| 2026 (82 comments)
|
| _Editor 's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated
| quotations_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 -
| Feb 2026 (205 comments)
|
| _An AI agent published a hit piece on me - more things have
| happened_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb
| 2026 (624 comments)
|
| _AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30
| comments)
|
| _The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are
| acting_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb
| 2026 (125 comments)
|
| _An AI agent published a hit piece on me_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (951
| comments)
|
| _AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer
| who closes it_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
| - Feb 2026 (750 comments)
| vpribish wrote:
| dang, we appreciate all you do. thanks
| dang wrote:
| that's nice of you to say! I must add that tomhow is
| holding so much of this effort that I can't imagine what it
| would be like solo
| swyx wrote:
| also how the heck do you pull all these related things, do
| you have a semantic/agentic search bot by now or is this all
| just from your head?
| dang wrote:
| It should be a semantic search bot and maybe will be in the
| future, but for now I rely on the method described at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546715 and the links
| back from there.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > It should be a semantic search bot and maybe will be in
| the future
|
| No. We only get the dystopian AI features, not the useful
| ones.
| themeiguoren wrote:
| There's also " An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me - The
| Operator Came Forward"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145
| dang wrote:
| Great catch. Added. Thanks!
| vadansky wrote:
| Good time to watch Shattered Glass.
|
| Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| It's an excellent movie, regardless. "When this
| thing blows there isn't going to be a magazine anymore!"
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=oj79mp2WEx0
| jackyli02 wrote:
| The role "reporter" deserves very little credence in AI now. The
| public might be better off if they get their information on AI
| from ChatGPT.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| The core story is literally about how AI made up facts. The
| solution is more of the same?
| neya wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? I just had
| to ask you this in a different context.
|
| You may not owe your least favorite publications better, but
| you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kittikitti wrote:
| "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead."
|
| You probably wish everyone would post as bots do, without em
| --dashes of course.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry but I don't follow
| neya wrote:
| > I just had to ask you this in a different context.
|
| Sorry, I just searched my comment history, maybe I missed it?
| Was it recent?
| dang wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223723
| apparent wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Perhaps I haven't noticed that they push
| pro-sponsored content (what does this mean, exactly?). I do
| find their comment section to be pretty lousy, and very
| partisan. But the tech coverage always seemed fair enough. What
| am I missing?
| neya wrote:
| If you feed their articles into a python script that
| identifies biases, subtle upsells and advertorials, you will
| see bunch of it is exactly just promotional marketing for
| some companies. They also almost never report the news, just
| opinions of it.
| sl0pmaestro wrote:
| Happy to see some accountability here. Athough it's unclear why
| the other co-author who stamped their name on that article was
| retained. Maybe they just stamped their name to meet their quota
| of articles. In any case this follow up action makes me take
| arstechnica standards a bit more seriously.
| aizk wrote:
| I have a story with Benji.
|
| Last year I went viral, and Benji was the first person to
| interview me. It was a really cool experience, we chatted via
| Twitter dms, and he wrote a piece about my work - overall did a
| decent job.
|
| Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was
| starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he
| wanted to cover us. No response.
|
| Then, tech crunch wrote an article on our project.
|
| I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat
| again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded, but
| said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive that he
| could only report on things that didn't have any prior or pre-
| existing coverage (?)
|
| I thought that was rather strange, especially since we already
| had built up a relationship.
|
| I don't really have a moral or lesson to this story, other than
| that journalism can be rather opaque sometimes.
|
| Oh one other tip for anyone reading this - if you do ever get
| reached out to by journalists, communicate in writing, not a
| phone call so you can be VERY precise in your wordings.
| areoform wrote:
| Sometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know
| how to say no.
| epistasis wrote:
| I know a lot of people that don't get through their email
| every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time,
| with the volume of communication required by daily work.
| Barbing wrote:
| Their repeat emailers might win eventually!
|
| Passing on some life advice to anyone who'd benefit, people
| are busy. Maybe they didn't respond because you're
| annoying?... no no, feel it out and text again a while
| later. Give them another shot, get to the top of their
| inbox or messages again.
|
| After someone told me that I realized it's true!
| abustamam wrote:
| Very few people email me except for endless newsletters
| that I accidentally signed up for. I try to un sub to a few
| every day but it seems never ending.
|
| In the event that you actually do end up emailing me, it's
| contingent on me actually checking my personal email, which
| I never do when I'm not working, and only sometimes do
| during work hours.
|
| If it's you asking me a favor that I'm not in the mental
| space for, I'll mark the message unread as a reminder to
| get to it later.
|
| Maybe I just have weird email habits, but I can get away
| with this because email is not a heavy part of my job.
|
| That being said, one guy was pitching me on something
| several times a month for several months. I just recently
| responded to him and apologized because of x y z. He said
| don't worry and we had a fruitful conversation later.
|
| So, follow through is important!
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was
| starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he
| wanted to cover us. No response. [...]
|
| > I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat
| again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded,
| but said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive
| that he could only report on things that didn't have any prior
| or pre-existing coverage (?)
|
| > I thought that was rather strange, especially since we
| already had built up a relationship.
|
| The US mentality might be different, but at least having grown
| up and living in Germany, such an annoying hustler who wants to
| use some journalist as a marketing influencer for his private
| project is a huge no-no. In other words: it is a _very_
| reasonable decision (perhaps even the only right one) for any
| journalist to fob off such a hustler.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >The US mentality might be different, but at least having
| grown up and living in Germany, such an annoying hustler who
| wants to use some journalist as a marketing influencer for
| his private project is a huge no-no. In other words: it is a
| very reasonable decision (perhaps even the only right one)
| for any journalist to fob off such a hustler.
|
| Yeah there seems to be a thing where in the US, what's seen
| as "selling yourself" or "putting your best foot forward" is
| considered excessive self-promotion / tall poppy behavior in
| other cultures.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Slightly off topic:
|
| Why is excessive self-promotion considered "putting your
| best foot forward"?
|
| I understand that you need the money, so you do self-
| promotion. But this is clearly not "putting your _best_
| foot forward ", but a "put a bad foot (annoy other people
| by excessive self-promotion) forward because you need the
| money", i.e. what many US-Americans do is by my
| understanding the opposite of this life advice which they
| give.
| ambicapter wrote:
| You're coming off as clearly not understanding the other
| side here. Obviously "putting your best foot forward" is
| not simultaneously "annoy other people by excessive self-
| promotion" in the mind of a single person.
|
| There are two different types of people, and they think
| of the same action in two different ways.
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| > Yeah there seems to be a thing where in the US, what's
| seen as "selling yourself" or "putting your best foot
| forward" is considered excessive self-promotion / tall
| poppy behavior in other cultures.
|
| It is a uniquely US thing & is a common struggle for
| foreigners who are new to US corporate culture.
|
| Can be especially tricky if you are a 3rd culture
| individual that has to manage relationships spanning
| different cultures in your daily life. You can't easily
| turn "hustler" mode off and on.
|
| It is a huge faux pas in almost every non-western culture
| and can wreak havoc in your personal life.
| albedoa wrote:
| That is the US mentality too outside of a small but
| persistent bubble of hustlers, supported by their symbiotic
| relationships with publications that need them just as much.
| aizk wrote:
| If simply saying "Hi, would you be interested in covering
| this?" characterizes me as an annoying hustler then you know
| what I'll take it.
| aizk wrote:
| I'm not hustling enough to be honest.
| Sammi wrote:
| This is an experience I've had with reporters multiple times.
| They don't like to write about the same thing twice.
| xnx wrote:
| My hunch is Ars will copy/reword/repost articles from real news
| sources (basically free for Ars) or do its own reporting for
| exclusive stories (costs reporters some time). No reason for
| Ars to spend reporter time on something they can copy.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I'm a journalist. As a general rule, if someone approaches me
| with a pitch for a feature or investigation (not news piece)
| that was already published elsewhere, I'll turn it down. To be
| fair, I turn down all PR pitches, but there are journalists who
| don't but still want an exclusive.
|
| It sometimes happens that you spend weeks or months working on
| a story, only to be scooped by another publication. It sucks,
| especially if you think your story is the better one, but
| unless you can pivot or add a substantial amount of new
| insight, it won't come out.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 are just naysaying.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I've never seen anyone here claim that AI never hallucinates or
| can't provide incorrect information.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I've absolutely seen commenters who claim that hallucinations
| are a thing of the past if you use the newest models. They're
| wrong, but they exist.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It's really easy to prove existence of a thing by showing
| the thing. Or, maybe, you hallucinated it?
| gertop wrote:
| I've not heard many people claim that LLMs don't hallucinate,
| however I have seen people (that I previously believed to be
| smart):
|
| 1. Believe LLMs outright even knowing they are frequently wrong
|
| 2. Claim that LLMs making shit up is caused by the user not
| prompting it correctly. I suppose in the same way that C is
| memory safe and only bad programmers make it not so.
| protocolture wrote:
| >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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The headline says Ars fired the reporter, but AFAICT the article
| doesn't include any facts that indicate this. All we know is that
| he no longer works there, and that Ars refused to provide any
| additional information.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Neither side has issued a statement about what happened, but
| Benj's Bluesky post does not read like a post of someone who
| would have resigned due to this.
| gwd wrote:
| > the article doesn't include any facts that indicate this.
|
| It does include two facts:
|
| 1. That the reporter's bio on the webpage changed "...is a
| reporter at _Ars_ " to "...was a reporter at _Ars_ ". On the
| one hand, that's pretty thin sauce. On the other hand, that's
| not exactly the sort of change that gets made randomly.
|
| 2. They reached out to the various people involved, and
| although nobody has confirmed it, it's also the case that
| nobody has denied it.
| bell-cot wrote:
| IANAL, but those facts could support "fired", or "resigned",
| or "short-term contract not renewed", or probably other
| stuff.
| dust-jacket wrote:
| I mean fired and resigned when it became clear you'd be
| fired are the same thing really.
|
| We're not actually entitled to know the exact details of
| someone's job ending. They worked there. Now they don't.
| That much is the bit we're entitled to.
| asadotzler wrote:
| For public misconduct like this, we should get to know if
| he was fired (or asked to resign) as opposed to his
| making the independent decision to find work elsewhere or
| retire or whatever. We should get to know if he left
| because the company wanted him gone or because he wanted
| to be gone.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't know that this is what happened here, but any time there
| is a push to do more with less, you end up rewarding people who
| take shortcuts over those who do a proper job, and from the
| outside, it looks like journalism has a push to do more with
| less.
| arcadianalpaca wrote:
| That's basically the problem. If the shortcut produces
| something passable 95% of the time and nobody is checking, it
| just looks like you're faster. Journalism just has a more
| public failure mode than most fields.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > any time there is a push to do more with less, you end up
| rewarding people who take shortcuts over those who do a proper
| job
|
| You don't need an institutional push to make people take
| shortcuts.
|
| Many people will take shortcuts to work less if they think they
| won't get caught. You don't even need external pressure.
| raincole wrote:
| 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.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly
| summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an
| answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can
| hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb
| lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles
|
| I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are
| stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.
| raincole wrote:
| > I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are
| stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.
|
| Yeah, that's why I said I don't know where the internet is
| heading to.
| jrmg wrote:
| You can see the fall in real time - half the sources are also
| dubious AI slop now and that number's only growing :-/
| Gigachad wrote:
| At work the conversation is that simultaneously everyone is
| using LLMs now, yet we receive virtually no traffic through
| them. The LLMs scrape our data, provide an answer to the
| user, and we see nothing from it.
| jrmg wrote:
| I have the same worry about LLMs in general - I know that
| 'model collapse' seems to be an unfashionable idea, but
| when the internet's just full of garbage (soon?...), what
| are we going to train these things on?
| tehjoker wrote:
| They moved away from raw text and are now working with
| verifiable synthetic data (eg math, games, code) to
| improve general reasoning.
| Barbing wrote:
| How often are they scraping?
|
| Also generally wondering... Do labs view scraping as
| legally safer than trying to cache the Internet? I figure
| it's easy to mark certain content as all but evergreen
| (can do a quick secondary check for possible new news).
|
| Maybe caching everything is too expensive?
| croes wrote:
| It will cycle.
|
| Without the content site the AI overview will become useless
| lucaspfeifer wrote:
| It is scary but also exciting. As long as there are humans
| making informed decisions, there will be demand for quality
| sources of information. But to keep up with AI, content sites
| will need to raise their standards. Less intrusive ads, less
| superficial stuff, more in-depth articles with complex yet
| easily navigable structure, with layers of citations, diagrams,
| data, and impeccable accuracy. News articles with the technical
| depth of today's dissertations.
| techpression wrote:
| For AI to steal and summarize without attribution. These
| sites you talk about exists today but are dying because of
| AI.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so
| good that I often don't check the links.
|
| You would know how?
|
| The links contradict or do not support the overviews often in
| my experience.
| deathanatos wrote:
| You should be checking the links more often, IMO. I've seen it
| respond a number of times with content that is not supported by
| the citations.
|
| While trying to find an example by going back through my
| history though, the search "linux shebang argument splitting"
| comes back from the AI with:
|
| > _On Linux and most Unix-like systems, the shebang line (e.g.,
| #! /bin/bash ...) does not perform argument splitting by
| default. The entire string after the interpreter path is passed
| as a single argument to the interpreter._
|
| (that's correct) ...followed by:
|
| > _To pass multiple arguments portably on modern systems, the
| env command with the -S (split string) option is the standard
| solution._
|
| (`env -S` isn't portable. IDK if a subset of it is portable, or
| not. I tend to avoid it, as it is just too complex, but let's
| call "is portable" opinion.)
|
| (edited out a bit about the splitting on Linux; I think I had a
| different output earlier saying it would split the args into
| "-S" and "the rest", but this one was fine.)
|
| > _Note: The -S option is a modern extension and may not be
| available_
|
| But this, ... which is it.
| archagon wrote:
| Uh, really? In my experience, at least a quarter of the info it
| gives me is usually manufactured or incorrect in some critical
| way.
|
| In fact, if you switch to "Pro" mode, it frequently says the
| complete opposite of what it claimed in "Fast" mode while still
| being ~10-20% wrong. (Not to say it's not useful -- there's no
| better way to aggregate and synthesize obscure information --
| but it should definitely not be relied on a source of anything
| other than links for detailed followup.)
| krige wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > -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.
|
| What good is it if the overviews lie some percentage of the
| time (your own guess is 10%) and you have to search to verify
| that they aren't making shit up anyway. Also, those SEO spam-
| ridden garbage sites google feeds you whenever you bother to
| look past the undependable AI summaries are mostly written by
| AI these days and prone to the same problem of lying which
| only makes fact checking google's auto-bullshitter even
| harder.
| ajkjk wrote:
| a lot of times the thing I'm searching for is something I
| kinda know and just want to see verified, or which, as soon
| as I see it, I'll know if it's right or not. So... some
| good?
| raincole wrote:
| > I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the
| overviews are always wrong are... basically lying?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
|
| No one remembers when AI Overview gets the answer right (it's
| expected to do so after all) but everyone has their favorite
| examples of "oh stupid AI."
| Terr_ wrote:
| That's incomplete, because another "nobody remembers" is
| when the hallucination differs from reality, but the reader
| doesn't promptly detect the problem _and_ remember where
| they got it from.
|
| Think about the urban legends in the style of "the average
| person eats X spiders per year." It's extremely unlikely
| that Rumor Patient Zero is in a position to realize it's
| wrong, or that they will inform the next person that it
| came from an LLM summary.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Today I searched something and almost pasted the output into
| an internet forum discussion I was having. But I decided to
| check the wikipedia source just to make sure. The AI summary
| was not quoted directly from wikipedia, and it got some major
| aspects wrong in its summary. Lesson learned.
| paxys wrote:
| It is simply summarizing the top few search results. If they
| are false then the summary will be false.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| That's not always the cause of the wrong info. I've had a
| few situations where I was asking pretty specific questions
| that absolutely have publicly documented authoritative
| answers, and the first several search results were either
| the authoritative sources themselves or things that
| reference the authoritative sources.
|
| The AI answer got the actual questions completely wrong.
| The questions involved vehicle registration laws in a
| specific state. The questions included the name of the
| state. The AI's answer seemed to be giving information
| based on other states.
|
| All of the first page of search results were specific to
| the state I asked for, so if it was just summarizing those
| you wouldn't think it would give answers that would only
| exist on entirely different pages.
| jcranmer wrote:
| For my anecdote, I don't frequently deign to look at the
| overview at all... but _every time_ I have, it has been
| completely and totally wrong. There 's probably some
| selection bias going on in when I choose to try looking at it
| again, but still notable that the frequency is that high.
| dirkc wrote:
| Well, I hope you take this story as a caution that you
| shouldn't do that in any way that can seriously compromise your
| career/health/finances.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Try searching for something niche. You'll get a confidently
| wrong and often condescending answer.
| abustamam wrote:
| The ai summary has been wrong so many times for me. Not that I
| ever trusted it anyway.
|
| I think content sites will need to rely on supporters (ala
| patreon or substack). It's shitty but it's what the internet
| has come to
| maccard wrote:
| Really? I've noticed that the AI overview is full of glaring
| issues repeatedly. It's akin to trusting the first Reddit post
| that is found by Google.
| g947o wrote:
| We must be using different Google.com.
|
| Sometimes I use a completely meaningless combination of
| keywords by mistake, and AI Overview will happily make up a
| story telling me what I am looking for.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Of what relevance is this to this discussion?
| mncharity wrote:
| > nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good
|
| I felt similarly yesterday. This morning AIMode fabricated for
| me a diverse science education publishing and research effort
| around using generative AI to teach rough-quantitative
| reasoning. My face-nibbling canary was a linked cite to a book
| "Orders of Magnitude"... a sci-fi horror novella about space
| marines. Would be nice if the outlined work actually existed.
| There we some nice ideas. I look forward to it. The education
| stuff, not the space marines.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| people have said enough about the ethics of all of it but what I
| found even sadder is that the story made me curious to take a
| look at the actual piece he "investigated" with AI, it's this one
| (https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...)
| This is btw a bit more than 1k words, which takes the average
| American reader, not senior journalist, ~5 minutes.
|
| This whole story involved asking Claude to mine this text for
| quotes, which refused because it included harassment related
| content, then asking ChatGPT to explain _that_ , and so on.
|
| That entire ordeal probably generated more text from the chatbots
| than just reading the few paragraphs of the blogpost. That's why
| I think the "I'm sick" angle doesn't matter much. This is the
| same brainrot as people who go "grok what does this mean" under
| every twitter post. It's like a schoolchild who cheats and
| expends more energy cheating than just learning what they're
| supposed to.
| lich_king wrote:
| I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first
| made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain
| that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.
|
| When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated
| incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I
| suspect they did, in the end?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Sad if true. I used to really enjoy reading his freelance
| articles in various publications pre-AI.
| Marsymars wrote:
| In defense of that, his writing style was basically the same
| long before LLMs.
| bragr wrote:
| The headline is a bit sensational considering all we know from
| the reporting is that he isn't working there anymore. Fired
| likely, sure, but not for a fact.
| AnonC wrote:
| 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 that this reporter was fired and yet Ars
| Technica doesn't publish a snippet of an article about it.
|
| There's something to be said about the value of owning up to
| issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In
| this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or
| vulnerable due to honesty, I would've thought that Ars would be
| or could've been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
|
| It's sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| you're participating in a social media site where something
| like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do
| something and write this article about it." So put your money
| where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more
| than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.
| petterroea wrote:
| 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
| single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the
| communication should have been better.
| esperent wrote:
| 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.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| 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.
| esperent wrote:
| Yes, those are exactly the kind of steps they would need
| to publicly commit to in order to retain trust. And yet,
| instead we get silence, no acceptance that some measure
| of responsibility falls on the editorial team here. So
| it's clear they just hope it'll blow over without them
| having to do anything, which is the opposite of what a
| trustworthy site would do.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| You have to give them time to do the job properly as
| well. Companies will often pay lip service to standards
| then squeeze their staff so much those standards are
| impossible to attain.
| autoexec wrote:
| > It was against their policy to use AI in producing any
| part of the final article, and the writer was aware of
| that.
|
| More than that, as a reporter on AI he should have been
| fully aware that AI frequently bullshits and lies. He
| should have known it was not reliable and that its output
| needs to be carefully verified by a human if you care at
| all about the accuracy or quality of what it gives you.
| His excuse that this was done in a fever induced state of
| madness feels weak when it was his whole job to know that
| AI was not an appropriate tool for the task.
| Barbing wrote:
| >his whole job
|
| Possibly akin to a roofer taking a shortcut up there,
| then taking a spill? You knew better but unfortunately
| let the fact that you could probably get away with it
| with zero impact decide for you.
|
| IIRC hallucinations were essentially kicked off initially
| by user error, or rather... let's say at least: a
| journalist using the best available technologies should
| have been able to reduce the chance of this big of an
| issue to near zero, even with language models in the loop
| & without human review.
|
| (e.g. imagine Karpathy's llm-council with extra
| harnessing/scripting, so even MORE expensive, but still.
| Or some RegEx!)
| true_religion wrote:
| Alternatively... there was no AI error, the reporter made
| up the quotes, and lied when they were challenged.
| bombcar wrote:
| The chance that the very first time AI was used it
| screwed up and was caught is pretty low.
|
| It's likely been used before but nobody got caught.
| Barbing wrote:
| Are you familiar with the reporter's work & reputation?
| gertop wrote:
| AnonC doesn't seem to be upset that the journalist was fired.
| The disappointment comes from Ars trying to brush this entire
| situation away by deleting articles, comments, and making no
| statement on their website.
| petterroea wrote:
| My understanding is that AnonC is upset at Ars not taking
| the mature approach by allowing this to become a learning
| moment for the employee and using it to double down and
| confirm their stance on AI generated content. There's
| strength in maturity. But I am doing some reading between
| the lines, and I'm possibly reading a bit too much into
| "There's something to be said about the value of owning up
| to issues"
|
| Reminds me of a story I was told as an intern deploying
| infra changes to prod for the first time. Some guy had
| accidentally caused hours of downtime, and was expecting to
| be fired, only for his boss to say "Those hours of downtime
| is the price we pay to train our staff (you) to be careful.
| If we fire you, we throw the investment out the window"
| lynx97 wrote:
| There is a difference between an error and totally
| misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no
| sympathy for journalists getting caught producing
| hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and
| should _always_ result in that person being fired.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let
| that shit through code review, and a customer impacting
| outage results, that should be instant termination. But
| it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to
| be held "blameless" right?
| watwut wrote:
| Joirnalist job was not to review ai-slop. That is rather
| crucial difference.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I love vibe coding but you are absolutely right. We're at
| the stage where vibe coding is a fun way to produce
| sloppy software and that's fine if the intended user is
| just yourself and you're fully informed about what you're
| getting into. But actually shipping vibe coded slop to
| other people is wacky, anybody doing the needs to be
| manually reviewing every commit very carefully and needs
| to be prepared to accept personal responsibility for
| anything that slips by.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| The problem is that reviewing code for correctness is
| harder than writing correct code. So these things will
| always slip through review. I'm a little bit divided here
| whether we can (or should) blame a reviewer too harshly
| for letting broken code through review whether it's LLM
| or human generated.
|
| I've worked on teams with a rubber stamp review culture
| where you're seen as a problem if you "slow things down"
| too much with thorough review. I've also worked on teams
| that see value in correctness and rigor. I've never
| worked on a team where a reviewer is putting their job on
| the line every time they click "Approve". And culturally,
| I'm not sure I'd want to.
|
| That said I think it's pretty clear we need mechanisms
| that better hold engineers to account for signing off on
| things they shouldn't have. In some engineering domains
| you can lose your license for this kind of thing, and I
| feel like we need some analogous structure for the
| profession of software engineering.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hence why software engineers aren't an actual
| professional licensed engineers.
| bandrami wrote:
| "Make sure quotes in your article are things the subject
| actually said to you" is not something that should need a
| "learning moment".
| watwut wrote:
| Accidentally taking down production should not lead to
| firing. It should lead to improved process
|
| Making up quotes for article, with technology or not,
| should lead to firing.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| "should lead to firing..."
|
| ... and, also, improved processes. There should be no way
| an individual writer can damage the brand to this extent
| with absolutely no checks or oversight. This was just an
| error, but a bad actor could've put something far, far
| worse out there.
|
| Even an automated quote-checker might have helped in this
| case.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Fact checking is a vital part of the editorial process
| and clearly that process failed here. Tech people often
| have a double standard when it comes to journalism--rules
| for thee but not for me. However the structure is fairly
| analogous, in that both professions ship under lots of
| time pressure where mistakes can be costly. I'm not sure,
| honestly, who is most at fault here or why only the
| reporter was terminated. But my comment above was to
| highlight that there shouldn't be a double standard--if
| you think a journalist should be fired for this kind of
| error it would be inconsistent to believe a software
| engineer shouldn't.
| vpribish wrote:
| 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...
| jmbwell wrote:
| This. The truth is still putting on its shoes and all that
| 14 wrote:
| Where I work in healthcare honestly and owning up is encouraged
| and unless there is major negligence not often punished. They
| just want to try learn why the mistake happened and look for
| ways to prevent it going forward. My buddy said for his company
| if an accident happens WorkSafe is not out to punish as long as
| they are very forward and honest. Again they want to learn how
| to avoid it happening again. Punishment only scares others to
| try hide mistakes.
|
| I think they missed a big opportunity to instead of firing the
| guy sit him down and stress how not okay this was and that it
| harms the credibility and he needs to understand that and make
| a proper apology. They could make him do some education like
| ethical reporting responsibilities or whatever.
|
| Then like you say not just hide the article but point out the
| mistakes and corrections. Describe the mistake and how credible
| reporting is their priority and the author will be given
| further education to avoid this happening again. They could
| also make new policies like going forward all articles that use
| AI for search results must attempt to find a source for that
| information. This would build trust not harm it in my opinion.
| vintagedave wrote:
| I agree. I'd add that the fact he appeared to be working
| while sick -- and that he pre-emptively and immediately
| publicly apologised -- means I think he already _did_ behave
| as he should.
|
| This makes me question Ars not him. Loss of credibility
| indeed.
| sumeno wrote:
| If a doctor intentionally did something that they obviously
| know is unethical they would be fired too. This was not a
| "mistake", it is a huge ethical violation.
|
| This is more like writing your buddy a prescription for drugs
| to take recreationally
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| They're at this level because the editors have always had low
| standers.
|
| I don't know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars
| headlines are completely misleading.
|
| They've had this problem for years. They will publish anything
| that gets them clicks. They do not care if a writer makes
| things up. They do not care if their headlines are misleading -
| in fact, that's the point. They clearly got into the job in
| order to influence and manipulate people.
|
| They're bad people, with terrible motivations, and unchecked
| power. They only walk back when something really really bad
| happens.
|
| Never trust an Ars headline.
| 3abiton wrote:
| > They're at this level because the editors have always had
| low standers.
|
| It's not just Ars Technica. I would go as far as saying the
| big majority. I work at the biggest alliance of public
| service media in EU, and my role required me to interact with
| editors. I often do not like painting with broad brush, but I
| am yet to meet a humble editor yet. They approach everything
| with a "I know better than anyone else" attitude. Probably
| the "public" aspect of the media, but I woupd argue it's
| editorial aspect too. The rest of the staff are often very
| nice and down to earth.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << They approach everything with a "I know better than
| anyone else" attitude.
|
| My charitable read is that if one has to interact with the
| public, one naturally develops an understanding of what is
| wrong with it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _but I am yet to meet a humble editor yet. They approach
| everything with a "I know better than anyone else"
| attitude._
|
| They're like "UX experts" in software. One does UX for
| software, the other does UX for text. Same attitude
| problems, from the way you describe it. If the expert in
| something so subjectively judged is seen to be conceding
| anything, that might undermine their perceived expertise.
| Any push back is interpreted as somebody challenging their
| career.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > Any push back is interpreted as somebody challenging
| their career.
|
| I mean, yes, this happens quite a bit, especially with
| egotistical people.
|
| But to play devils advocate they do have to deal with a
| massive fuckload of bullshit asymmetry where people
| dumber than rocks spew forth a never ending stream of
| stupid crap with the authority of an LLM.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I don't know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars
| headlines are completely misleading.
|
| I believe they are doing A/B testing on these.
|
| Ah yes, I remember correctly _for once_ :
| https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-front-page-
| arti...
|
| TL;DR: They are doing _mandatory_ A /B testing since _2015_.
| bombcar wrote:
| A/B headline testing is just scientific clickbait.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I didn't argue that it isn't?
| bombcar wrote:
| I was agreeing; anyone who admits to using A/B headline
| testing is just admitting to be a clickbait factory.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You ever ask the question why they would want to be a
| clickbait factory?
|
| Because it pays the bills, unfortunately. Google has
| sucked up all the advertising dollars that used to pay
| for media and the rest of the world is now doing card
| tricks to earn scraps to pay the bills.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I disagree. You could A/B test two good, accurate, well-
| written headlines and stay clear of clickbait altogether.
| Sure, you're still optimising for the most popular, but
| "clickbait" doesn't just mean "well performing", there's
| also an implication of duplicity.
|
| I have a modicum of experience here. I write for another
| online media company and, although we produce our own
| headlines, we are 'strongly encouraged' to write
| clickbait headlines, to the extent where we are asked to
| remove instances of specific product names (etc.) in
| order to be mysterious and not give the game away too
| early. (Yes, in case it wasn't clear, I hate this!)
| bombcar wrote:
| Sure, you can be above board (and perhaps they even try)
| but that recent "WiFi is broken wide open" headline that
| turned out to be something about device-to-device and not
| wargaming told me where their hearts lay (in being paid,
| understandably).
| simianwords wrote:
| Example?
| g947o wrote:
| Same for the Verge. Sometimes their headline or content
| contains factual errors. If you point it out in the comment,
| sometimes they do it properly and add a correction, other
| times they quietly fix it and delete your comment. So much
| for their free speech stance and editorial practice.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _always had low standards_ "
|
| Always? Or since they were bought by Conde Nast in 2008?
| adornKey wrote:
| A few years ago I liked Ars Technica, but then somehow I
| think quality went down the drain. Did something happen to
| them a few years ago? If they get rid of the crazy reporters
| and go AI only - maybe the quality will improve again to a
| readable level.
| tw85 wrote:
| It doesn't help that the background of most Ars' writers was
| some variant of "former IT pro", which is almost guaranteed
| to mean they're unqualified to write with nuance and depth
| about serious technical topics. So you have guys like Jon
| Brodkin pumping out total nonsense about the latest wireless
| communications breakthroughs (just one example I remember)
| while 99% of the audience has no clue and won't check them on
| it.
| jrmg wrote:
| Is it normal/expected for a news organization to publish that
| they fired someone? I'm inclined to take the 'don't comment on
| personnel matters' at face value.
|
| They did report on the article quote sourcing debacle at the
| time - perhaps not as quickly as some would've liked, but
| within a couple of days.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even).
| Here's an example:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo
|
| I think they're an outlier, but still I was disappointed by
| Ars's response. They deleted the article and didn't detail
| what was wrong with it at all. Felt like a cover-up.
| buran77 wrote:
| > They deleted the article
|
| This was a big disappointment. I read the original article
| and the comment from the source highlighting the error,
| knew what was wrong with it, and still think it was the
| wrong move to just delete the article and all the original
| comments, and replace it with an editorial note.
|
| This is a kind of cover-up. It's impossible to hide the
| issue but they went to great lengths to soften the optics
| and remove the damning content from the public record. They
| obscured the magnitude of the error. It looks like another
| "person uses AI and gets some details wrong".
|
| What they did so far, the decisions that allowed the issue
| to occur in the first place (e.g. no editorial review
| before publishing) and the first reaction to deal with the
| incident (just destroy the content, article and comments)
| is everything I need to know about the journalistic
| principles at ArsTechnica. it's a major loss of trust for
| me.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| To be completely fair, BBC news is effectively a different
| organisation which has the BBC name. There's a fairly good
| overview of it here:
| https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko
| kitd wrote:
| BBC News does have to report on itself from time to time.
| Here's it's "live" feed from November on the
| Parliamentary Committee investigation into the Trump
| speech edit incident:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp34d5ly76lt
|
| (edit: technically, it was Panorama. I'm not sure if that
| is part of the News remit or separate from it).
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the
| editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article,
| adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the
| original author of the article is not working with Ars
| anymore.
|
| It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a
| better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened.
|
| I also want to note that, this last incident response is not
| typical of the Ars I'm used to.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| > this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm
| used to.
|
| They never really announced Peter Bright leaving
| ArsTechnica either though. At least not until much much
| later.
| bayindirh wrote:
| That was a criminal case, though. The court process may
| have prevented them from talking about it to keep things
| fair.
|
| I'm not a US citizen and IANAL, so YMMV.
| pavon wrote:
| It isn't just Dr Pizza. In recent history (perhaps since
| being bought by Conde Nast?), when staff left, stories
| from them simply stopped appearing, and questions about
| whether they had left or were on a break were met with
| crickets. The only conformation came when the bio was
| changed and/or they announced they were hiring or had
| hired the person replacing them.
|
| At least that is what I remember with Sam Machkovech, Ron
| Amadeo, Cyrus Farivar, Joe Mullin, Andrew Cunningham,
| Casey Johnston, Jaqui Cheng. And the policy doesn't
| appear to be limited to people leaving on bad terms since
| Andrew has since returned, and Cyrus occasionally
| contributes freelance articles. The last time I remember
| them announcing a departing staff member is when Ben
| Kuchera left.
| donohoe wrote:
| No. That can happen but it's not the only path. An article
| can be retracted. That said, it's usually noted somewhere
| else.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're right, but I told about what Ars does 99.999% of
| the time. This is the only exception I see Ars retracts
| an article and buries it deep like this.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know what you're basing that on.
|
| It seems entirely normal and standard to retract articles
| and publish a note elsewhere that it was retracted. In
| fact, it's common because if an article had one fabrication
| it might have others which you haven't discovered yet, so
| you don't want to keep it up.
|
| Whether they want to announce that the journalist was fired
| is up to their discretion. But it's not necessary or even
| normal.
|
| I don't know why you're talking about a "mark", a "scar",
| that "immortalizes". That's weird and frankly a little
| disturbing. The journalist got fired and the article got
| taken down and a note was made by the editor. That's
| accountability working as intended. I don't know why you
| want more than that.
| bayindirh wrote:
| First, I didn't want him to be fired, frankly. I have a
| comment telling exactly that when this thing happened.
|
| Second, as a reader following Ars for more than 10 (15?,
| IDK) years, I never seen them abruptly retract an article
| like this. Their modus operandi is correct and own the
| corrections. This is what I always said (this is the
| third time in a comment train).
|
| We all have scars. From a fall, from a cut, physical,
| emotional, whatnot. You don't need to feel sad, or get
| disturbed about it. A scar is a life's way of making you
| remember something. If it's your own making, it makes you
| remember what not to do. If it's someone else's making,
| it's makes you remember an unfortunate event you made out
| alive.
|
| Owning your mistakes by correcting an article and marking
| it is greater accountability than saying "this has never
| happened, nothing to see here, move along". I'll not
| comment further on firing of the author. I don't have
| enough information on any side, or I don't know them
| close enough to say anything further than I wish he
| didn't get fired.
| crazygringo wrote:
| But retracting an article is _more_ serious than making a
| correction.
|
| The accountability comes from the editor's note. It's
| there already. It's owned.
|
| You're acting like this is some attempt to bury a
| mistake. It doesn't appear to be. It's what happens when
| you don't even have faith that the rest of the article is
| correct.
| jrmg wrote:
| There was nothing at the article's URL for a day or so
| after it was pulled (on a holiday weekend, FWIW), which I
| agree isn't great. But there is, now, a page up at the
| article's original URL:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-
| reje...
|
| with a locked comment leading to the Editor's statement:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-
| retractio...
|
| I disagree with the idea that the misleading article text
| should remain up after a retraction.
| g947o wrote:
| If a news organization publishes an article welcoming someone
| onboard, they should also do that when someone is fired
| because of a scandal.
|
| Of course, if someone leaves because of personal reasons or
| jumping ship, there is no reason to do that. But this is
| different.
| donohoe wrote:
| Sorta. Usually they would do a press release or a post on
| their company blog - not an article.
|
| Aside, posting about a new hire is easy and has no legal
| livability. Posting on a departure can be a tangled web.
|
| I do agree that some note by Ars would be good here.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| The complications of HR policy and law do not allow for
| your proposed solution.
| g947o wrote:
| I have no experience in that area, but it's hard to see
| how a plain, factual statement "This person is no longer
| with the company." can be problematic.
| pavon wrote:
| That statement by itself wouldn't warrant an article, and
| it would be difficult to include a statement like that in
| a larger article about the event, without implying more
| than that.
| vasco wrote:
| They're a random tech blog, the kind of website that is peak
| time waste slop, why would they have any standards? Even the
| new york times and the Washington post put up wrong things all
| the time without corrections. People need to realize
| journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth. They
| are there to sell ads, the same way a youtube video of a guy
| eating too much food in front of a camera is.
|
| Journalism has devolved into content creation in the literal
| sense of the word, they are just there to put something inside
| the div with the id "content", to justify the ads around it.
| lukan wrote:
| "People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not
| some beacon of truth."
|
| You just changed the meaning of journalist. Now sure, the job
| of some journalists could be better described as ad sellers,
| but I rather call those like that and restrict the original
| term to actual journalists who actually care about truth.
| Because they still exist.
| vasco wrote:
| The 3 people that work at Reuters actually doing journalism
| are not doing in ANY way a similar job to the millions
| writing blog posts for Ars Technica like publications. The
| latter is an ad seller indeed. And the majority of
| publications that are renowned also do little to no
| journalism.
|
| It's as if we called "web devs" that learned JS on udemy
| and just vibe code, Computer Scientists and treated them as
| if they publish compiler research papers. It's just a
| completely different job
| lukan wrote:
| Eric Berger at Ars for instance is someone I consider a
| journalist. Have you proof, that he systematically
| neglects truth in favor of ad selling?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Berger is a real one. I'm surprised he's lasted so long
| at Ars Technica. I think eventually his objective
| reporting of SpaceX will get the Are Technica reader base
| to demand his firing, Ars readers are very reddit-like.
| Team minded, not interested I hearing dispassionate
| takes. Hearing Elon Musk criticized as a person while
| simultaneously seeing SpaceX described as a real and
| highly accomplished company gives reddit/ars readers
| tonal whiplash, such people prefer simple narratives
| without nuance.
|
| See also, in this very thread, somebody who thinks Berger
| has a strong pro-musk bias because his reporting and
| books say that SpaceX are good at what they do.
| lukan wrote:
| "Ars readers are very reddit-like"
|
| How can you know? I think you mean _most reddit
| commentors are very reddit like_ (nowdays I tend to
| agree). I read Ars from time to time, but I never
| commented there. But still, when I read comments, I don
| 't get the impression that Berger is close of getting
| fired.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > How can you know?
|
| They don't know; their whole comment is just empty
| insults about simpeltons. If anything should have the
| derision that "slop" gets, it should be the thousands of
| comments like that which hit HN every day.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It's a little thing called reading. I read Are comments,
| I read reddit comments, and I judge them to both be a
| bunch of morons who are perpetually suspicious of nuance.
| lukan wrote:
| You did not seem to got my point, that there are readers,
| but not all of them are commentors? So judging all
| readers because you perceive commentors as mainly stupid
| is maybe missing data?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You're right, I used the word readers when I was talking
| about the commenters. My apologies to Ars readers who
| don't comment, including myself.
| carabiner wrote:
| It's cuz Ars's roots are in being video game bloggers and
| graphics card reviewers, not legitimate journalists. They don't
| have a notion of professionalism or journalistic duty, only
| virality and juicy takes.
| kergonath wrote:
| Ars never commented about firing staff before, and it happened
| on several occasions. You get the occasional article when
| someone joins, never when someone leaves. They should have
| published another article after all this, but I would not
| expect them to comment about staff.
| anakaine wrote:
| And I think thats a good thing. People screw up, and
| journalists are people. This person's punishment for their
| screw up was losing their job. They do not need to be dragged
| into a hit piece.
|
| Ars can, and probably should if they have not already,
| publish a piece about hallucinations and use of AI in
| journalism, and own up to their own lack of appropriate
| controls and reflections. They do not need to drag the
| authors name into the write up. It can be self critical of
| themselves as a journalistic outlet.
| g947o wrote:
| Nobody needs to publish a hit piece.
|
| Ars could have just said "After investigation, we reviewed
| our editorial process. The author of the article is no
| longer with the company." factually and objectively.
|
| I can't see how this could possibly be a negative or
| harmful thing.
| beloch wrote:
| "I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of
| Shambaugh's words rather than his actual words," Edwards
| continued. He emphasized that the "text of the article was
| human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not
| representative of Ars' editorial standards."
|
| ----------
|
| A reporter whose bailiwick is AI should have known that he
| needed to check any quotes an LLM spat out. The editorial staff
| should have been checking too, and this absolutely _is_
| representative of their standards if they weren 't.
|
| It would probably be worth checking to see if any other
| articles or employees have similarly disappeared.
| b112 wrote:
| Editorial staff?
|
| There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000. Then, as
| profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely disappeared.
|
| Purely online entities have no way to pay for real editorial
| staff.
|
| News has no money, compared to news of old. It's part of the
| reason 99% of modern news is just reporting other people's
| tweets or whatever.
|
| I can't imagine many news companies having much money for
| court battles (to force disclosure of documents, or force
| declassification, or fighting to protect sources). Or
| spending months or years investigating a story.
|
| Our news sources are poor, weak now.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Agreed. Modern news is beyond lazy, and is not journalism
| by any means. Too many talking heads do nothing but sit
| behind a screen watching others for what to say next.
|
| Granted, a few of the remaining newspapers I'm aware of run
| business awards (Best restaurant, etc), and the way to win
| is via wining and dining them, even though the paper claims
| it's based on people's votes.
|
| That style of thinking - of entitlement - probably brought
| the lack of interest in both cable news and traditional
| web/paper outlets - as the younger generations started to
| see through it more.
| katzgrau wrote:
| I think you missed the point of the parent comment.
|
| The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now
| goes elsewhere (Google and Meta).
|
| It's left very little in terms of resources for staff.
|
| Think about what the quality of commercial software would
| be like if there wasn't enough money for QA and testers
| and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles
| at 30k and 40k.
|
| That's the news industry right now. Poorer quality
| product.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| The money used to go to Hearst and co. The golden age of
| journalism is mostly a mirage.
| plufz wrote:
| I can't talk for the US but here in Sweden most news
| media have fewer journalists today. Is that not the case
| in your country or in what way is it a mirage?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Maybe it's different in Sweden, but when I read old
| American newspapers, from a hundred years ago, 90% of it
| is absurd slop that people would laugh out loud at today.
| plufz wrote:
| 50 years then?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > is not journalism by any means
|
| It literally is journal-ism.
|
| Wikipedia: " _Journalism is the production and
| distribution of reports on the interaction of events,
| facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day"_"
|
| Britannica: " _Journalism, the collection, preparation,
| and distribution of news and related commentary_ "
|
| Stories from British Newspaper Archive[1]:
|
| - June 1950 Cat in Tree in Sheffield - Sheffield Daily
| Telegraph
|
| - July 1939 A cat which has sought refuge the top of a
| tree on Somerlayton Road, Stockwell, defied all attempts
| to get it down. - Sunderland Daily Echo.
|
| - June 1956 A cat was rescued from a 60ft. oak tree by
| Southgate firemen at Abbotshall Avenue, Southgate. - Wood
| Green weekly herald.
|
| - Ocober 1959 CAT UP TREE I was sorry to hear that your
| cat had been lost Frances, I hope he is none the worse
| for his experience up the tree, now. - Penrith Observer.
|
| - July 1956 Cat in tree rescued. Worthing firemen rescued
| a cat - Worthing Herald.
|
| - July 1955 RESCUED CAT IN TREE - Percy Kemp climbed 40ft
| up a tree to rescue a cat - Bradford Observer.
|
| - November 1956 An emergency tender from the Eastbourne
| Fire Brigade went to the rescue of cat in a tree in
| Brassey-avenue, Hampden Park - Eastbourne Gazette.
|
| - August 1953 Clifford Morton (25) climbed 120ft up a
| swaying fir tree to rescue a cat - Coventry Evening
| Telegraph.
|
| - March 1950 Persian cat belonging to Mrs M. ___ ...
| heard meow-ing from a 40ft. tree in field nearby - Dundee
| Evening Telegraph.
|
| - February 1950 CAT UP TREE A telescopic ladder.
| belonging to Birkenhead Fire Service was rushed three
| miles to Arrowe Park Road. Woodchurch. this afternoon. to
| rescue a cat which had climbed over 40 feet up a tree -
| Liverpool Echo
|
| - October 1924 SHOTS AT CAT IN TREE .. It was stated that
| the boys saw a black Persian 'cat up a tree on the farm,
| and they fired at it - Daily Mirror
|
| - July 1939 CAT IN TREE FOR TWO DAYS - Harlepool Northern
| Daily Mail
|
| - August 1962 CAT IN TREE RESCUED BY FIREMEN -
| Lincolnshire Free PRess
|
| - May 1956 The story of a stray cat, Mr. Budd and a 45ft,
| fir tree, was told at Wednesday's annual meeting of the
| Torquay and South-East Devon branch of the R.S.P.C.A. -
| Torquay Times
|
| - etc. etc.
|
| When was this imaginary wonderful time you're implying
| when newspapers were only speaking truth to power with
| mighty investigative reporting, and not literally a
| journal of things people did and said in a local area (or
| on a certain topic)?
|
| [1] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/resu
| lts?bas... tree&retrievecountrycounts=false
| a4isms wrote:
| _A few of the remaining newspapers I 'm aware of run
| business awards (Best restaurant, etc), and the way to
| win is via wining and dining them, even though the paper
| claims it's based on people's votes._
|
| Is that how it works where you are? Because over here,
| the best way to win an award from a publication is to
| advertise in that publication. Advertise enough, and
| you'll also become their go-to when they need a quote
| about anything vaguely related to your restaurant or
| other business, and once a year or so they'll print some
| hagiographic article about the amazing things going on
| under your leadership.
| WarmWash wrote:
| How many ars readers do you think don't use ad block?
|
| Tech audiences are _the worst_ to be advertisement
| dependent on.
| troyvit wrote:
| > Editorial staff?
|
| > There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000.
| Then, as profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely
| disappeared.
|
| In a lot of ways you're right, but our public radio station
| (cpr.org) has the largest newsroom in the state, and that
| newsroom makes up over a third of our staff. So yeah "news
| companies" don't have news rooms but that's because their
| business isn't news. It's funneling user data to their
| parent companies and getting people to click ads.
|
| However, thanks to "listeners [and viewers, and surfers]
| like you" public media is still working its ass off to make
| a difference despite being cut lose from the government. It
| won't work unless you switch your perspective to local news
| (where most of the real information is anyway) and unless
| you donate.
|
| Apologies for turning a comment into a mini fund-drive :)
| vintagedave wrote:
| Yes: in newsrooms, this is the editor's responsibility. I
| note the editor wasn't fired.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It's the editors responsibility to make sure fabricated
| quotes don't get published, but it's also the journalist's
| responsibility to not paste fabricated quotes from a
| chatbot into their articles. The responsibility of the
| former doesn't negate the responsibility of the latter.
|
| I can't just submit shit work all day long then blame QA
| when some of it goes through. That's like a burglar saying
| it's the cops fault that people got burglared.
| lynx97 wrote:
| When more and more typos started to creep into news
| articles of our state-owned, national news feed and people
| started to notice, the explanation we got was basically
| that the frequency of news articles is so supposedly so
| high that it is supposedly impossible to catch them. If
| news orgs can't even do as much proof reading that they
| catch typos and grammatical errors, I highly doubt anyone
| is still doing editorial checking...
| gruez wrote:
| Isn't that the factchecker's job?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's the editor's responsibility to set processes and
| standards to try to make sure this doesn't happen. If the
| rules exist but the reporter breaks them, then it's the
| reporter's fault and they get fired. As happened -- that's
| part of the process of maintaining standards. It's not the
| editor's fault. What exactly do you expect them to do? They
| can't fact-check and verify every single fact and quote in
| every article. They're not superhuman.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Why not? Copy-paste-google would be a sanity check for
| 99% of them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because they're busy doing the rest of their job? They
| don't have enough time for it, nor is it a good use of
| their time.
|
| That's like asking why the CEO of a 20-person startup
| isn't reading every line of code for bugs. It's not the
| best use of their valuable time.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > beloch 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
|
| "I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of
| Shambaugh's words rather than his actual words," Edwards
| continued. He emphasized that the "text of the article was
| human-written by us"
|
| ... except the bit that wasn't.
|
| Nomination for Weasel Words of the Year award.
| vintagedave wrote:
| I'm sad to see them fire him. I've seen far worse: I have
| always approached issues by asking for accountability and
| improvement. Frankly, he already did: he openly apologised. I
| was very happy with that, it demonstrated integrity and I
| remained respecting him.
|
| Even worse,
|
| > I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to
| reliably address it (still am sick) [0]
|
| In an earlier HN thread, I saw someone ask why Ars was
| requiring staff work while ill. If that's true, if he posted
| without verification while sick and under pressure, which is
| implied and plausible, firing looks doubly bad.
|
| Ars has lost a lot of my trust in recent years, with articles
| seeming far worse. Just like you, I'm sorry to see the
| editorial position here.
|
| [0]
| https://bsky.app/profile/virtuistic.bsky.social/post/3mey2mq...
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| He posted his not very impressive apology as images not text
| that is easily indexed. I do think that was purposeful and
| manipulative and very much makes me question his motivation.
| If I'm missing the original posting in text I'd sure like to
| know so I can correct this perception.
| vintagedave wrote:
| In fairness, people often do this in order to have a full
| statement visible, not a portion, not spread over multiple
| posts, etc.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong. I just caution that jumping to
| 'purposeful' (re not easily indexed), 'manipulative' etc is
| a very strong leap.
|
| I also found the post by searching for a quote from it, so
| I think images with text likely are indexed. I can't
| imagine in 2026 they wouldn't be.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You're taking his fever dream excuse at face value, and I
| think you probably shouldn't. It reads like a lame excuse to
| deflect personal responsibility, a cynical face-saving
| tactic.
|
| If the illness was genuine, can he document that he advised
| management of this fever and they told him to submit an
| article anyway? It's not his bosses job to stick a
| thermometer up his ass every morning.
| seethishat wrote:
| I agree. In my experience, no one cares when you are sick.
| No one. Maybe your mom, but that's it. Using it as an
| excuse when you make a mistake is even worse. People value
| responsibility... "Sorry, my bad, won't happen again", not
| excuses.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > You're taking his fever dream excuse at face value
|
| Being sick with a bad fever is awful, it's a nightmare, and
| I cannot imagine making good decisions at the time.
|
| I do not know if he was ordered to work while sick, but
| there are often implicit expectations in workplaces and
| this was a time-sensitive article.
| asadotzler wrote:
| >I do not know if he was ordered to work while sick
|
| You don't know if they were even sick at all. In fact,
| when someone gets fired for cause, it's quite common for
| them to lie about the circumstances. That you take their
| comments at full value seems kinda naive.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Ars has probably the most rabid anti-AI audience of all the
| tech publications
| dust-jacket wrote:
| Nah, The Register is far more strongly anti-AI. Mention AI
| and systemd in the same article and watch them froth
| ChrisSD wrote:
| > Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article
|
| That's a very "shoot the messenger" statement. While Aurich is
| the community "face" of Ars, I very much doubt he has the power
| to do anything like that.
| rob_c wrote:
| > It's sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
|
| This was from a journalist _who_is_hired_as_expert_ at knowing
| of/about tooling that hallucinates (LLM ((AI)) chatbots).
| Decides to implicitly trust said technology to write a "hit
| piece" (lets be honest it was).
|
| In several territories that would fall under slander and if is
| untrue is a major journalistic mis-step and career ending faux-
| pas.
|
| Why in any situation would their position now be defendable?
|
| This is akin to being a journalist of iron-mongering writing a
| "truth" piece on how "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" (if you
| don't get my reference here, lucky you). It's outright un-
| professional.
|
| Blaming it on illness allows everyone to save face, but they
| were compos mentis enough to hit publish at the time. That
| itself carries a certain "I'm well enough to agree this is a
| good article" from said author.
| xnx wrote:
| Ars is not journalism. It's scraped content to put between ads.
| mmmpetrichor wrote:
| I disagree strongly. I've found that they have more
| journalistic integrity than most mainstream news pages. Did
| you see the extremely strong post from the senior editor
| after this AI hallucination was discovered in a published
| story? And then the reporter was dismissed.
| elAhmo wrote:
| > There's something to be said about the value of owning up to
| issues and being forthright with actions and consequences.
|
| Exactly! The situation happened, no going back, but they had a
| choice - to be transparent about it and I am sure people would
| be appreciative of it, maybe giving them net positive rather
| than negative, but the choice they have made is a complete
| opposite and a sign that no one should trust them.
| smallerize wrote:
| Ars isn't winging it here, they are following Conde Nast HR
| processes. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80
| %99s-note-... "I can confirm that the HR processes are
| intricate and complicated. I can confirm that we have union
| writers. I can confirm these things take time." -Aurich
| zombot wrote:
| Yep, Ars Technica is off my reading list. They completely lost
| my trust.
| jmbwell wrote:
| I note that Ken Fisher did post an editor's note, Benj did
| publicly own up to it, and all of this was mentioned in the
| article.
| radiohead89 wrote:
| > It's sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
|
| They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity
| above all.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I cannot disagree with you more strongly.
|
| Ars did own up to its mistake both in writing and in firing the
| author. The author himself fell on his sword in detail on
| Bluesky.
|
| Your only real complaint is that their published explanation
| wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that means it's sad
| to see them at this level?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The author himself fell on his sword in detail on Bluesky.
|
| Not exactly. He wrote a long excuse blaming being sick,
| sidestepping the issue that he was using AI tools to write
| for him and not making an effort to fact check.
|
| Also Bluesky is not Ars Technica. It doesn't matter what he
| posts on his own obscure social media page. We're talking
| about the journalistic platform where he was given a wide
| audience.
|
| > Your only real complaint is that their published
| explanation wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that
| means it's sad to see them at this level?
|
| Why do you not think that's a valid complaint? It appears
| they eventually did part ways, but Ars Technica has also been
| trying to lay as low as possible and avoid the topic in hopes
| that it will blow over.
| madamelic wrote:
| Maybe I don't understand journalism but this guy being a
| reporter, shouldn't he have had an editor reviewing his
| work before they hit publish? I understand trusting a
| senior reporter but I would think due to libel concerns,
| they would check people's quotes ESPECIALLY if the reporter
| was sick.
|
| Honestly it seems like journalism has been in their 'vibe
| code' era for a decade where they just publish whatever
| typos and all.
|
| This was an institutional error, not an individual
| reporter's fault. We should also be asking why he was still
| contributing when he had a high fever. Why did his editors
| push him to publish his work? I will certainly write code
| and answer questions when I am sick when I am up to it but
| I would never push to main while sick.
| lich_king wrote:
| It is not a job of the editor to assume that the author
| is lying to you.
|
| > This was an institutional error, not an individual
| reporter's fault.
|
| Ah yes, "the system made me use AI".
| barbazoo wrote:
| More akin to not having code reviews in opinion. If the
| process isn't there you're just not picking up certain
| issues.
| iepathos wrote:
| If the Ars Technica editorial process requires assuming
| reporters don't fabricate quotes, then their process is
| inadequate. That's like a software company letting junior
| engineers release directly to production with just a
| spellcheck and no real process to catch errors. Major
| publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. have
| a dedicated fact-checking department that is part of the
| process and needs to give the ok before any article is
| published. Why is their process so deficient by
| comparison? Why wasn't there any fact checking?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > That's like a software company letting junior engineers
| release directly to production
|
| This person wasn't a junior.
|
| Editorial processes don't actually check every single
| line of everything that is written. Journalists are
| trusted to report accurately. This person demonstrated
| they could not be trusted.
|
| > Why wasn't there any fact checking?
|
| Why do programmers ever let any bugs get to production if
| they have code review? Journalistic outlets do not fact
| check literally every line that is ever written before it
| goes to publication.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I agree completely, the people who are acting like it's
| Ars' responsibility to assume every sentence from their
| journalists are lies just aren't being realistic.
|
| And even if Ars editors had caught the fabricated quote,
| what then? Obviously he should still be fired. Ars could
| probably benifit from better editors but even so this
| doesn't absolve the journalist of any of his own blame,
| for being the one responsible for introducing these
| fabrications in the first place.
| greedo wrote:
| But they generally (or at least they did when I was in
| the biz) fact check quotes. It only takes a few minutes
| to fire off an email.
| starkparker wrote:
| As someone who worked as a newspaper copy editor for the
| first third of my career, "assume that the author is
| lying to you" was the entire job.
|
| A lapse in that non-hypothetically left me responsible,
| and legally liable, in situations like this.
| madamelic wrote:
| > legally liable
|
| I think this is the thing people are missing the most.
| Libel is an incredibly serious thing to do. Misstating a
| fact is a faux pas and a bad look but misquoting someone,
| especially if that article is taken as a hit piece, can
| cost hundreds of thousands or millions.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| The "system" should make it difficult to make mistakes.
|
| But more importantly, why can't both be at fault?
|
| Having fact checkers review every articles you publish is
| a very low bar (as in you should not be in the business
| of publishing news if you can't do it effectively).
| Aurornis wrote:
| The root offense wasn't that this was published. The root
| problem is that the author submitted an LLM hallucination
| as a story. He should have faced consequences even if it
| had been caught.
|
| > This was an institutional error, not an individual
| reporter's fault.
|
| The person who caused the problem is at fault. It doesn't
| help to do mental gymnastics to try to shift blame to a
| faceless institution. The author is at fault.
|
| > We should also be asking why he was still contributing
| when he had a high fever. Why did his editors push him to
| publish his work?
|
| I think you're putting too much stock into the excuse.
| The author got caught doing one of the things you cannot
| do as a journalist: Publishing fake quotes. He was
| looking for any way to excuse it and make it not his
| fault so he could try to keep his job.
|
| He made the choice. The consequences are his to bear. If
| it had been caught before publishing he still should have
| faced the consequences.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| > Maybe I don't understand journalism but this guy being
| a reporter, shouldn't he have had an editor reviewing his
| work before they hit publish?
|
| While the journalist is still responsible for their own
| actions, I agree with you that this being published in
| the first place is indicative of a deeper failure akin to
| - "if a junior dev accidentally deletes your production
| db on their first day that's on the company itself"
| Aurornis wrote:
| > failure akin to - "if a junior dev accidentally
|
| This person was not a junior.
|
| He chose to use the AI tools knowing that they
| hallucinate.
|
| The comparisons to an untrained junior are illogical.
| This person was a long time reporter who knew better.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Even a senior dev being able to unilaterally delete your
| prod entirely should not be possible.
|
| But I don't think the intention was to compare with
| junior devs, its just a popular shorthand for "your
| process sucks".
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But I don't think the intention was to compare with
| junior devs
|
| Junior was said specifically.
|
| A better analogy would be if one of your staff engineers
| decided to connect OpenClaw to his workspace and it found
| a way to delete the production DB.
|
| The author was an AI reporter. You can't argue that he
| didn't know what he was doing when he made these choices.
| Any comparisons involved junior devs are just dishonest.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > Junior was said specifically.
|
| Yes, but I think you are taking this phrase more
| literally than its meant to be read.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't think so. Junior was a key designator in the
| claim and words have meanings. It would have been easier
| to leave it out if they didn't intend for it to
| contribute meaning.
|
| I think this is turning into a Motte and Bailey argument
| where the junior dev story is used to push the argument
| and then it's backpedaled out when others identify the
| fallacy.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| I was using a common "phrase" that highlights individual
| human error vs systemic failures
|
| Since you are stuck on the semantics allow me to rephrase
| - "if a single developer is able to delete your entire
| production db, that's an org failure"
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Specifying a junior dev on his first day is a plain
| deliberate rhetorical ploy to frame systemic blame as
| more legitimate than individual blame. If not, then why
| not make it a senior developer? Anybody can fuck
| something up, but we give special consideration to noobs
| who make noob mistakes, and that's what is being
| implicitly appealed to, illegitimately. This journalist
| wasn't a noob, and using ChatGPT to write his article was
| an error in judgement but not an actual mistake.
| newswasboring wrote:
| The original author clarified and you are still stuck
| here? Take a step back dude it's not that serious.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| _" You disagree with me? Whoa dude, you need to relax and
| touch grass."_
| afavour wrote:
| Sadly this is a reality of the money disappearing from
| the journalism industry. You're right, there absolutely
| should be fact checkers. A reporter absolutely shouldn't
| be filing while sick. And the big news orgs still do
| that. But I doubt Ars has the resources.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _But I doubt Ars has the resources._
|
| Ars is owned by Conde Nast, which is owned by Advance
| Publications. Ars's parents could have funded all these
| to ensure journalistic integrity, but would rather
| squeeze their staff and make money off the brand goodwill
| and advertising.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Ars did own up to its mistake both in writing
|
| The Ars "own up" didn't even ID the article or the author.
| hluska wrote:
| Republishing an article with corrected quotes is reserved for
| cases where an editorial team can trust the substance of an
| article. There is an error but that error doesn't impact the
| amount of trust the editorial team has in the article.
|
| A retraction is totally different. It means that an editorial
| team does not trust any of the underlying article. It's the
| biggest stick in journalism and is only reserved for the
| absolute worst breaches of trust.
|
| When you retract an article and then update the author's bio to
| past tense, that's as clear of a signal as you can ethically
| send. A publication with clout makes news and writes the first
| line of people's obituaries while they're still alive - a
| degree of tact, professionalism and newsworthiness comes into
| play.
| smallerize wrote:
| There's no point trying to update an article with fake sources.
| If you can't trust the material, there's no story. I think
| pulling it was the right move here.
| calyth2018 wrote:
| Conde Nasty corrupts eveything.
| dust-jacket wrote:
| I absolutely disagree.
|
| This has been done very professionally. They pulled the
| article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to
| pretend it hasn't happened.
|
| Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an
| attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole
| text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an
| attempt to hide something.
|
| Because the retraction notice hid the article name and the
| author name?
| tw85 wrote:
| I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago
| in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was
| arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually
| allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it,
| but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people
| defended this course of non-action by saying it was the
| sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become
| witnesses in the trial.
| breput wrote:
| As much as I respect the site and gladly financially support it,
| this is ultimately a failure on Ars Technica and its editors. If
| there are any.
|
| If this were just some random blogger, then yes the blame is
| totally theirs. But this was published under the Ars Technica
| masthead and there should have been someone or something double
| checking the veracity of the contents.
|
| That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that
| are among the best in their fields: Eric Burger, Dan Goodin, Beth
| Mole, Stephen Clark, and Andrew Cunningham amongst many, so one
| f'up shouldn't really impugn the entire organization.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors
| that are among the best in their fields_
|
| I miss Maggie Koerth & Jon Stokes
| Y-bar wrote:
| Yes, dearly missed. As is John Siracusa's Mac OS reviews.
| clint wrote:
| Most of these people left because the Ars readership is
| insanely toxic as evidenced in this thread.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Could be. I am currently scrolling the comments on the
| new Apple displays and the gatekeeping "Only rEaL
| ProoOOOs should have any achual use for frame rates over
| 60. Ur just lowly a gamer. Shoo!" attitude is through the
| roof there.
| DamnableNook wrote:
| Eric Berger has a strong pro-Musk bias (having literally
| written a fawning book about him). To him, Musk can do no
| wrong, it seems.
|
| I also dislike Dan Goodin's reporting. He tries to talk the
| talk, but nearly every article he writes has some tell that he
| doesn't really understand the thing he's reporting on. Which is
| fine if he was relying on third-party expertise and quoting
| that, but he tries to make it sound like he has the expertise
| and it just comes up short. I feel like he's a good example of
| that old fallacy that you think the news is correct about
| everything, until they report about something you know.
|
| For me, Ashley Belanger is the best reporter they have. She
| might not have the subject matter expertise some of the others
| there claim, but she has the best journalism of anybody there.
| Lots of direct sources, well written, and the right level of
| depth. I honestly feel like I'm reading a different (and
| better) publication when I read her articles. More than once,
| I've had to scroll up to see if the article I'm reading was one
| of Ars' licensed outside pieces, as the quality bar was higher
| than I'm used to, only to find her name.
|
| Beth Mole is a close second. She has subject matter expertise,
| good journalism, and loves to slip in some humor or justified
| "get a load of this idiot" comments.
| infotainment wrote:
| I'd say if one has any interest in writing objectively about
| space technology, one will likely end up being perceived as
| having a "pro-Musk bias".
|
| Elon himself is indeed questionable, but you really can't
| argue with his space-related achievements. Even other
| eccentric billionaires like Bezos haven't come close.
| sbarre wrote:
| Perhaps we should be attributing the "space-related
| achievements" to Musk's companies and employees, and not to
| him directly, or at least not solely?
| asadotzler wrote:
| Your comment makes it pretty clear you've not read him
| much. He regularly credits SpaceX with specific
| accomplishments and rarely brings Musk into the topic
| unless it's about setting direction, etc.
| senko wrote:
| Berger wrote 2 books about SpaceX (not Musk), and he
| definitely does _not_ have a pro-Musk bias.
|
| He's is careful not to opine on Musk's other dealings, which
| is fair. As someone who wants to know more about SpaceX, I
| don't want to read yet more about Tesla, or Twitter, or
| Trump, or Epstein.
|
| Personally, one of the authors I most like to read on
| ArsTechnica (though he writes rarely nowadays).
|
| CarTechnica though .. yuck. Also, Oulette reliably picks
| movies and TV shows I will absolutely hate, so I guess good
| S/N there?
|
| Mole's coverage is great if you're into Cronenberg-but-in-
| real-life.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think it's pretty widely agreed in the space flight
| community that Eric Berger is currently the best space
| flight reporter in the world. He has lots of insider
| sources. Several times he correctly predicted things years
| in advance. Most recently the Artemis III change to a LEO
| mission.
| latexr wrote:
| > He's is careful not to opine on Musk's other dealings,
| which is fair. As someone who wants to know more about
| SpaceX, I don't want to read yet more about Tesla, or
| Twitter, or Trump, or Epstein.
|
| But all of those matter, and are not isolated. When the
| leader of an organisation is distracted by the other
| organisations they control, it matters. It also matters
| when they are repeatedly wrong about their predictions,
| even if on another organisation, because it helps you
| calibrate expectations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_auton
| o...
| senko wrote:
| > But all of those matter, and are not isolated.
|
| And have been done to death elsewhere.
|
| Meanwhile, Berger produces balanced, informed,
| interesting, and informative coverage of space tech (in
| general, not just SpaceX).
| latexr wrote:
| Fair. I misunderstood your original post as "not wanting
| to read/care at all about", but you did say "yet more".
| Thank you for clarifying.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Yeah Goodin's stuff is often slop.. Probably human slop but
| slop nonetheless.
| latexr wrote:
| > that old fallacy that you think the news is correct about
| everything, until they report about something you know.
|
| Gell-Mann Amnesia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-
| Mann_amn...
|
| The description is slightly backwards. The problem is you
| continue to trust the news _after_ seeing how wrong they are
| about something on which you're an expert.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Berger is clearly guarded and measured when he talks about
| Musk and SpaceX. Given the configuration of the space
| industry and the reality that Berger clearly needs access to
| make his living, I think Berger has provided generally even
| handed coverage of SpaceX, Musk and Musk's antics.
|
| For example, his article on the SpaceX/xAI merger ends with a
| section called "Has SpaceX lost its way?", and framing that
| clearly indicates "this is what Musk says".
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/spacex-acquires-xai-
| plans...
|
| In his article on SpaceX's "pivot from Mars to Moon", he
| describes Musk as "In the last 25 years, Musk has gone from
| an obscure, modestly wealthy person to the richest human
| being ever, from a political moderate to chief supporter of
| Donald Trump; from a respected entrepreneur to, well, to a
| lot of things to a lot of people: world's greatest
| industrialist/supervillain/savant/grifter-fraudster.".
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/has-elon-musk-given-
| up...
|
| You can read a AMA he did on the SpaceX subreddit last year
| for more of his thoughts: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/com
| ments/1fnq02q/eric_berger...
|
| I think Berger got a lot of flack for not really commenting
| on Musk and DOGE during his articles last year, and I think
| it's fair to criticize him for that choice, but I don't think
| it's really a "Musk can do no wrong" position.
|
| In other words, I think you really need to read between the
| lines for Berger re Musk.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I think you have far too much faith in the process for the big
| media sites
| fp64 wrote:
| Sad state of things. He did it because he was sick? That's close
| to claiming his dog ate the original quotes so he had to make
| some up.
|
| Well, Ars Technica is already for quite some time on my ignore
| list, and this further solidifies its place there.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I think that there's a potential different story with this. He
| felt that he had no option but to do work, even though he was
| so sick that he failed at the job. What's up with that? How
| insecure and pressured is his employment?
|
| If it's not true then the error is on him. But it seems
| plausibly bad to me as an outside observer of US employment and
| healthcare customs. And the precarity of journalism nowadays.
| It is a sad state of things, as in it could be more a systemic
| than individual failure.
| fp64 wrote:
| Circumstances can help explain, but never excuse unethical
| behavior
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Systems can make such failures inevitable. The language of
| "blame" vs. "excuse" is not the most relevant.
| fp64 wrote:
| Are you saying unethical behavior is not a choice but
| forced by the system? That it would be unreasonable to
| expect people to behave ethically in situation were the
| system is set up in a way that does not reward ethical
| behavior? That lying and cheating can always be excused
| because if people didn't, they would endager their
| societal status?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| No. That's a wild gallop off in a pointless direction
| using the same irrelevant language.
| smallerize wrote:
| Isn't Ars agreeing with you here though? It's not excusable and
| they fired him even after the apology.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That was wise. It was an honest mistake, but a direct hit to is
| credibility that made not just him, but the paper, look sloppy.
| And in an era where people are deeply concerned about journalism
| pedigree.
| protocolture wrote:
| >The Conde Nast-owned Ars Technica
|
| I despise Conde Nast
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| orwin wrote:
| They have. Some paper journals even have a dedicated space in
| early pages (2-3) for corrections and retractation.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This isn't a case of "made a mistake"/"did something
| incorrectly", though. This is "knowingly broke the rules". They
| had a policy against using our benevolent robot overlords to
| generate slop.
|
| And fabricating quotes is pretty high up there in the list of
| things that journos should never, ever do.
| kuschku wrote:
| > I guess Blameless Postmortems haven't arrived in journalism
| yet.
|
| Not anymore. Back in the day of print newspapers, a dozen
| people read an article before it was printed, including
| editorial staff, fact checkers, legal review, layouting and
| printers. If something slipped through - which was much rarer
| at the time - they'd also print a retraction.
|
| Most of that stopped when newspapers and the blogosphere
| basically merged into one ad-funded business.
| sumeno wrote:
| This is more akin to "looking into your ex's private data at
| work" than "made a mistake that caused a production outage"
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| kolinko wrote:
| Which version? I just tested mine and it replied with an actual
| quote
| ModernMech wrote:
| The model hosted at chat.com gave me that. It told me what he
| said about debugging, but also included that made up quote as
| well which it attributed to him. But what it _should_ have
| said was "Kernighan has no famous quotes about naming
| languages, you're probably thinking of the quote by Knuth
| about the importance of naming in language design."
| gigatexal wrote:
| This is good. They had to distance themselves from a journalist
| who would do such a thing. But this is more or less on the editor
| I think. So let's see if they learn from this.
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| Are Technicas editors fabricate misleading headlines all the
| fucking time.
|
| The editors are the ones ultimately responsible for what they
| publish. Yet they're not taking responsibility.
| jmward01 wrote:
| You will never get the internet to agree on how incident x should
| have been handled. I think the world right now is running to
| figure out AI and its place. Just when you think you understand,
| the ground shifts. It is clear that in the future this exact use
| of AI will be expected and work, on average, way better than a
| person. I know that a lot of people probably have an emotional
| 'no it won't!' and disagree with me here but there have been so
| many 'no it won't! never!' moments passed in the last two years
| that I can't imagine this won't also be one. With that in mind I
| don't think it is reasonable to fire this journalist. They used a
| tool too soon but it is really hard to figure out what is too
| soon right now. This should have been a moment of reflection for
| their news room (and probably some private conversations) but it
| turned into a firing which I think is too much. Did the news room
| gain from that? Will it prevent them from doing it again? Did it
| fix the original mistake? I don't think the answer is 'yes' to
| any of these questions. A good retraction, apology, statement on
| how they are changing and will review new technology entering the
| newsroom in the future. Those help.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The problem is accountability. If your name is on the article,
| this is your work. If you publish an article with fabricated
| quotes, it's your fault regardless of if an AI tool was used or
| not since you hit the button at the end to sign off on it.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I care about the future. I care that actions taken help
| improve the future. If someone makes a mistake the question
| shouldn't ever be 'how do we punish them' but instead 'what
| actions can best improve the future'. Sometimes that does
| mean firing a person. If the effort to fix their behavior is
| more than the expected gain then that is an option to
| consider (not the only thing to consider though). In this
| case though I think there is likely more to it. What were
| their policies? Have they been pushing their journalists to
| accept more AI tools? Even without pushing AI tools, have
| they been implying that speed is more important than
| accuracy? Was this truly JUST this journalist's mistake or
| are their culture elements that are missing in the newsroom?
| I would expect the head of that news room to have a detailed
| rational of why firing this person was the right choice. How
| does it help them move forward and improve? Why this isn't
| just a decision to try to deflect blame from their internal
| culture problems. As is this looks like a case of 'the
| internet got mad. Do something to make them happy'.
| ares623 wrote:
| If a tool is not fit for purpose then it either gets fixed or
| gets discarded/replaced.
|
| AI is not a tool and from the way things are going never will be.
| Humans are more tool-like in that sense. In this case the human
| was discarded, the AI remains.
| skc wrote:
| Really disappointing. A lot of us have always considered Ars
| Technica to be the last of a dying breed of ultra serious, no-
| nonsense professionalism.
|
| Obviously, we were rocked by the DrPizza scandal years ago...and
| now this.
|
| Sobering.
| cubefox wrote:
| I liked his articles about AI. They were generally quite good. He
| has an understanding of AI that usual journalists don't have. But
| to use an LLM for writing is deception.
| klustregrif wrote:
| This reads like "I was sick and my dog accidentally used AI to
| write my homework"
|
| If the content is human written and you check your sources there
| is no way for AI to "accidentally" seep in. Sure you can use an
| AI tool to find links to places you should check and you can then
| go and verify sources. That's obviously not what happened.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I read the bluesky in article posted and Benj Edward's images
| that he had sent in bluesky.
|
| The main comment I found relevant is probably this (There is more
| that he has written but I am pasting what I find relevant for my
| comment)
|
| > I have been sick with Covid all week and missed Mon and Tues
| due to this, On friday, while working from bed with a fever and
| very little sleep. I unintentionally made a serious journalistic
| error in an article about Scott Shambaugh
|
| ... > I should have takena. sick day because in the course of
| that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased
| version of Shambaugh's words rather than his actual words.
|
| > Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes
| in my outline against the original blog source before including
| them in my draft
|
| The journalistic system has failed us so much that in the news
| cycle, we want things NOW. I think ars-technica post went viral
| on HN as well before the whole controversy and none were wiser
| until Sam commented about the false quotes.
|
| It prefers views and to get views you have to do work now. There
| is no room left for someone being sick and I think that this sort
| of expands to every job at times.
|
| And instead of AI being a productive tool, it can act as a noise
| generator. It writes enough noise that looks like signal and
| Tada, none are the wiser.
|
| People think that using AI with an person is gonna make their
| work 10x more but what's gonna happen is the noise is raised 10x
| more and the work of finding signal from that noise is gonna
| increase 10x more (I am speaking about employment related
| projects, obv in personal projects this might not matter if it
| might have 10x noise or 100x noise if it can just do the thing
| you want it to do)
|
| When AI systems are constrained, they can deny you your api
| request with marginal loss. But when Human people are
| constrained, they really can't deny your employee's request
| without taking massive losses at times (whole day leaves) and I
| have heard in some countries, sick days can be a joke. This could
| very well be cultural because sick days are well implemented in
| Europe compared to america (from what I hear)
|
| I don't know about Benj but some reporters are really paid
| peanuts. Remember the pakistani newspaper which had pasted
| Chatgpt Verbatim with content like ""If you want, I can also
| create an even snappier 'front-page style' version with punchy
| one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout perfect for
| maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?." WITHIN
| the newspaper.
|
| I believe that humans should be treated with more dignity so that
| they feel comfortable around taking sick leaves when they are
| sick... or just fixing this culture that we have of people
| chugging along in sick leaves.
|
| Until then, AI is bound to be used, I don't think that this is
| gonna be a single incident, and AI will produce noise/spew random
| stuff. Imagine you are a journalist and you are sick and you feel
| like there's a magical tool which can do the job for you when you
| are sick. You use it and in the moments of sickness, you are in
| the IDGAF attitude and push the article to main.
|
| I personally don't believe that this is gonna be a single
| incident with this whole story playing out like this at the very
| least.
|
| If any Journalist is reading this, please take sick leaves when
| you are sick. Readers appreciate _your_ writing and I hope you
| don 't integrate AI tools into your workflow (a lot) that the
| work is started being done by AI in this case. Even without AI I
| feel like you guys might not be working at the best mental space
| and Readers are happy to wait if you add unique perspectives into
| the story, something I don't think is possible when you are sick.
| If any employer try to still pressure you, just share this
| message to them haha to tell your employer what the people want
| (and what brings them money long term).
|
| I also hate how the culture has become of finding the article
| which came the fastest after an event happens because that would
| promote AI use more often than not and it to me feels like
| jackals coming out of nowhere to try to take whatever piece you
| can take out of a particular news and that to me doesn't feel soo
| great of look. (I know nothing about how such journalism works so
| sorry if I am wrong about anything, I usually am but these are
| just my opinions on the whole thing)
| DiskoHexyl wrote:
| I'ts an open secret that even the larger news outlets mandate LLM
| use. They buy subscriptions and have guidelines on how to mask
| the output (so that it would read less AI'ed), how to fact-check
| the links and the quotes etc. The authors which aren't willing to
| jump on this particular train are quickly let go due to
| performance.
|
| The expectation is to produce more with much less (staff), the
| pipeline is heavily optimized for clicks, every single headline
| is A/B tested- Ars isn't alone in churning out poorly reviewed
| clickbait (and then not owning their mistakes)
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Is there any evidence that Are Technica management induced this
| journalist to use AI, or are you just claiming it's an "open
| secret" and don't know anything about this specific incident?
| Because without any kind of details it kind of sounds like the
| latter, maybe motivated by a reflex to blame management
| whenever workers blunder? Unless there's evidence that a
| actually points at Ars Technica management, dismissing the
| journalists professional responsibilities using vague rumors
| doesn't seem appropriate.
| DiskoHexyl wrote:
| I didn't state that Ars Technica specifically mandate LLM use
| for their authors. What I did state about them is that their
| editorial standards are lacking, and they tend to produce a
| lot of clickbait.
|
| IMO the industry is in crisis
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| How is it an open secret? Is there evidence for this? I
| still see typos in some articles so it feels like humans
| are in the loop, maybe that's their AI masking?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > I'ts an open secret that even the larger news outlets
| mandate LLM use.
|
| Given the context, if you didn't intend for this to imply
| that Ars mandates LLM use, you should probably rewrite it.
| amatecha wrote:
| I definitely interpreted his original post as suggesting
| that Ars also mandates LLM use, even if the words didn't
| say that explicitly. "even the larger news outlets"
| implies "in addition to the one we're already talking
| about"
| donohoe wrote:
| I would love to hear more about this "open secret" - especially
| the guidance on how to "mask the output" etc. because as
| someone who works in news/media it's news to me.
| maplethorpe wrote:
| > Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and "while working
| from bed with a fever and very little sleep," he "unintentionally
| made a serious journalistic error" as he attempted to use an
| "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool"
|
| I'm skeptical. I hate to be the one to say it, but I don't think
| this would have happened if he was using Claude 4.6 Opus.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's another way of saying "dog ate my homework".
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| So this is another way how you can lose your job because of AI.
| arizen wrote:
| "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"
|
| -Isaac Newton
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Man, the IRONY hurts. I love Ars for what they do and their
| comment section.
|
| The readers there are borderline militant about AI's more
| problematic uses. This could have gone only one way.
| plutokras wrote:
| The comment section under any AI-related article is
| unbelievably negative, and the headlines are feeding the fire
| too. Ashley Belanger's articles are the most notorious
| examples, like "Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on
| scam ad profits to fund AI". The actual content has nothing to
| do with AI; Meta simply spends on AI infrastructure from
| profits made elsewhere...
|
| I still read and sub to Ars - as they are the least bad source
| of day-to-day technews - but quality is dropping.
| the_af wrote:
| To me this is extremely relevant regardless of the specifics in
| this case. From TFA:
|
| > _It also comes at a moment in which many media bosses are
| pushing staff to find uses for AI -- as are executives across
| most industries -- even while clear guidelines around use of the
| technology that uphold editorial ethics remain elusive._
|
| Anyone who's working with computers now knows this is true. We're
| being pushed relentlessly to use AI; in some cases (I've heard
| second hand) people are _mandated_ to use AI, sometimes forbidden
| from crafting code manually, and are disciplined if they don 't.
| Yet the guidelines are very unclear, as they must be since if
| we're honest we're all threading new ground.
|
| This, being mandated to use AI at all costs yet given very
| brittle/unclear indications on _how_ to use it, and these
| guidelines evolve weekly, and also we 're all fearful of losing
| our jobs, makes for a recipe for disaster.
|
| So yeah, this journalist should have called in sick and use
| better judgment when toying with AI tools, but still there's a
| wider problem and the responsibility for this craziness is also
| on the leadership of most companies _and_ the investors pusing
| for this.
|
| (None of this is an excuse for generating AI slop. I hate it and
| I don't need to be told any guidelines about not doing it. If you
| cannot be bothered to write the text, I cannot be bothered to
| read it.)
| zombot wrote:
| > It also comes at a moment in which many media bosses are
| pushing staff to find uses for AI
|
| Which should be a red flag in and of itself. You don't need to
| "push" people to "find uses" for genuinely useful tools.
| pluc wrote:
| > ...he attempted to use an "experimental Claude Code-based AI
| tool" to help him "extract relevant verbatim source material." He
| said the tool wasn't being used to generate the article, but was
| instead designed to "help list structured references" to put in
| an outline. When the tool failed to work, said Edwards, he
| decided to try and use ChatGPT to help him understand why."
|
| This, right here. Coming from an "AI Expert", this is what we can
| expect the future to be. One AI isn't working? Let's ask the
| other AI why. I have no words for that reflex. It's beyond
| idiotic. It takes everything that's human about your reasoning
| and tosses it aside. What a dumb idea.
| nijave wrote:
| The irony is Ars readers tend to be fairly anti LLM in the
| comments of every article
| HardwareLust wrote:
| "He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an
| "isolated incident."
|
| Yeah, no.
| angelfangs wrote:
| In a post gamergate world dunno why people still rate Conde Nasty
| gracelynewhouse wrote:
| The individual firing is a distraction from the structural issue.
| Newsrooms have been cutting editorial staff for a decade, which
| means the verification layers that would have caught this --
| fact-checkers, copy editors, senior editors doing source
| verification -- largely don't exist anymore. Then they adopt AI
| tools that increase throughput without increasing oversight
| capacity, and act surprised when fabrication slips through.
|
| This is a classic systems failure: you remove the safety
| mechanisms, add a new source of risk, and punish the individual
| operator. It's the same pattern you see in industrial accidents.
| The Swiss cheese model applies -- every editorial layer that got
| cut was a slice of cheese being removed.
|
| The more interesting policy question is whether publications
| should be required to disclose AI tool usage in their editorial
| process, similar to how financial publications disclose conflicts
| of interest. The FTC has signaled interest in AI-generated
| content transparency but hasn't issued concrete guidance for
| journalism yet.
| guerython wrote:
| This is exactly why every AI citation we publish goes through a
| blocker. We dump the AI transcript plus the generated case
| numbers into a little script that hits the official court
| database and only passes through citations that return the same
| case id, party names, and paragraph text. If the extra lookup
| fails, the shot has to be marked as a hallucination, logged in
| the docket, and a human has to go re-verify with the actual law
| reports before we file anything. Treat the LLM like a drafting
| helper, not an authority, and make the human verification the
| gate that moves the draft from "AI promised" to "judicially
| safe." We also keep a micro audit trail so if a clerk says "the
| AI gave me this," we can replay how the prompt went and which
| citation check failed. What guard rails have other people put in
| front of AI-written judgements?
| bsimpson wrote:
| I recently saw an interview with Anders Hejlsberg of TypeScript
| (and a long pedigree before that). The interviewer asked him
| about the role of AI in his work. I believe the context was
| porting TypeScript's tooling to Go.
|
| His trick is to use AI to build the tools that do the work, not
| to ask it to do the work itself. If you say "hey Mr. AI, please
| port this code to Go," it'll give you back a big bag of code
| that you have no insight into. If it hallucinated something,
| you wouldn't know without auditing the whole massive codebase.
|
| If instead you let AI build a small tool to aid the work, your
| audit surface is much smaller - you just need to make sure the
| helper tool is correct. It can then operate deterministically
| over the much larger codebase.
| flerchin wrote:
| The commentariat senses blood in the water and will criticize Ars
| Technica no matter how they respond here. It seems fine. The
| author really paid the price. I trust Ars to be extra vigilant to
| this going forward.
| thefringthing wrote:
| I bought a handmade arcade-style SNES controller from this guy
| one time. He should go back to making those, I guess.
| yesterdayjones wrote:
| These comments are full of people who are not and have never been
| journalists talking about editorial processes they don't
| understand. I was a journalist before AI (and have since pivoted
| to software development), so I feel the need to correct a
| mistaken assumption.
|
| 1. An editor's role is not to make sure all quotes are accurate
| to what the source spoke or wrote. They are not babysitters. It's
| a higher-level position that is supposed to ensure that the
| article makes sense; that the sources are sufficient in number
| and are credible; that the story covers the assigned topic, etc.
| Your job as an editor is _not_ to babysit your reporters.
| Reporters are given a large degree of freedom and are expected to
| have sufficient education/training and ethical grounding* to do
| their jobs independently. What seems to have happened here is a
| lapse in judgement while the reporter was sick and on a deadline.
| Pressure's a bitch.
|
| 2. This is certainly more of an opinion, but AI tools have zero
| place in any profession that relies on information integrity
| (law, journalism). The reporter shouldn't have used it, and the
| editors and editorial processes are not at fault, especially when
| Ars already forbids AI-generated content.
|
| * I'm aware people think reporters are liars with agendas. You
| don't need to say it.
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