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Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article
- FatalLogic 11mo agoThe online edition was edited later. "This newspaper report was originally edited using AI, which is in violation of Dawn’s current AI policy. The policy is also available on our website. The report also carried some junk, which has now been edited out. The matter is being investigated. The violation of AI policy is regretted. — Editor" https://www.dawn.com/news/1954574 https://www.dawn.com/news/1954574 edit: Text link of the printed edition. Might not be perfect OCR, but I don't think they changed anything except to delete the AI comment at the end! https://pastebin.com/NYarkbwm https://pastebin.com/NYarkbwm
- nicbou 11mo ago> The violation of AI policy is regretted. That's a good example of when you shouldn't use passive voice.
- benterix 11mo agoOTOH kudos to them for regretting AI slop (even if they don't want to point out who precisely is regretting). I know some who'd vehemently deny in spite of evidence.
- serial_dev 11mo agoThey don't regret serving you AI slop, they regret that the "writer" didn't even read their own article and that they got caught because of it.
- IAmBroom 11mo ago"We regrets that mistakes were noticed."
- steve_taylor 11mo agoIt's a good example of when you should use AI.
- throwaway638637 11mo agoThat's just a manner of speaking in former British colonies, or at least the subcontinent. Much of formal speech like a bureaucrat wrote it because, well, the civil service ran India and that's who everyone emulated.
- thoroughburro 11mo ago> That's just a manner of speaking in former British colonies, or at least the subcontinent. Which is still a good example of when you shouldn't use passive voice. Clarifying where “optimising language to evade a responsibility” evolved does nothing to justify it, which you imply with “that’s just”.
- hbarka 11mo agoIt’s still passive voice, the kind used when trying to avoid blame or responsibility. So pretty much fits in bureaucratic places. That’s just…mistakes were made.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- throwup238 11mo agoThis pattern of writing goes back to the Spanish conquistadors at the very least. They frequently described their actions in a passive voice when doing something they knew was horrible, only to switch to aggrandizing active voice when writing about their successes. It’s a standard way to blur responsibility and present violence as an almost natural “fact” rather than a deliberate action by identifiable agents. It didn’t escape everyone’s attention though. Bartolomé de las Casas definitely noticed it.
- pixelpoet 11mo ago> This door is alarmed
- dredmorbius 11mo agoThis is a convention for journalistic corrections, e.g., "The Times regrets the error", used to note corrections for at least a century: <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/insider/the-times-regrets-the-error-readers-dont.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/insider/the-times-regrets...>
- strix_varius 11mo agoYour example is not passive voice.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoYes, they are pointing out how it should have been written.
- strix_varius 11mo agoApparently not.
- vintermann 11mo agoOn the other hand, this way you know they probably didn't use the chatbot to write the apology.
- elwebmaster 11mo agoOf course, since we live in 1984 already everything is edited as is convenient. For all that technology has given, nobody talks about what it has taken away.
- mikkupikku 11mo agoFinally, some truth in media.
- chrismorgan 11mo agoThe current title (“Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article”) isn’t correct, it wasn’t the prompt that was printed, but trailing chatbot fluff: > 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? The article in question is titled “Auto sales rev up in October” and is an exceedingly dry slab of statistic-laden prose, of the sort that LLMs love to err in (though there’s no indication of whether they have or not), and for which alternative (non-prose) presentations can be drastically better. Honestly, if the entire thing came from “here’s tabular data, select insights and churn out prose”… I can understand not wanting to do such drudgework.
- wg0 11mo agoThank you, yes that's accurate and I am not sure if article itself is accurate. Don't think so it would have no incorrect stats. By "AI prompt" I mean "prompted by AI" Edit: Note about prompt's nature.
- nashashmi 11mo agoIt might be better to mention “Dawn newspaper” instead of “Pakistani newspaper”.
- chii 11mo agoThis is the new "[placeholder here]" misprint/typos of the LLM era.
- sammy2255 11mo ago[flagged]
- bschne 11mo agoThe same thing happened to German magazine Spiegel recently, see the correction remark at the end of this article https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-trennt-sich-von-gueterverkehrschefin-sigrid-nikutta-a-f0da35c7-8208-461c-a802-b60014cf80f1 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-...
- kavith 11mo agoFair play to them for owning up to their mistake, and not just pretending like it didn't happen!
- bonesss 11mo agoAs programmers I think we can extend some professional empathy and understanding: copy-and-pasting all day is a lot harder than you’d think.
- CGamesPlay 11mo agoMaybe, although I'm a bit doubtful that they were 100% honest. > Entgegen unseren Standards
- yard2010 11mo agoYou're absolutely right! but they can shove this euphemism. Just say that chatgpt wrote the article and no one read it before publishing, no need for all the fluff.
- 11mo ago
- ineedasername 11mo agoWhen reached for comment on how this occurred, the journalist in question replied: “This is the perfect question that gets to the heart of this issue. You didn’t just start with five W’s, you went right for the most important one. Let’s examine why that question works so well in this instance…”
- sph 11mo agoNow I’ll have to look out for news posts that have a question in the title and begin with “Great question!”
- complianceowl 11mo ago"Would you like me to break this down for you in a table format?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tempodox 11mo agoThat wasn’t a journalist, it was an LLM. But they forgot to add the prompt.
- jones89176 11mo agono shit, Sherlock! ;-)
- forinti 11mo agoAs people get comfortable with AI they'll get lazy and this will become common. A solution is to put someone extra into the workflow to check the final result. This way AI will actually make more jobs. Ha!
- serial_dev 11mo agoOr they will set up one more AI automation: "This article will be posted on our prestigious news site. Our readers don't know that most of our content is AI slop that our 'writers' didn't even glance over once, so please check if you find anything that was left over from the LLM conversation and should not be left in the article. If you find anything that shouldn't stay in the article, please remove it. Don't say 'done' and don't add your own notes or comment, don't start a conversation with me, just return the cleaned up article." And someone will put "Prompt Engineer" in their resume.
- sph 11mo agoWelcome to a post-scarcity world — as if we needed cheaper ways to create digital low-quality content in the hands of anyone, for free. Not long after we invent a replicator machine the entire Earth is gonna be turned into paperclips.
- energy123 11mo agoThis mostly harms written journalism. As people seek humanness in their media, they'll be driven even more into the dens of cult-leaders masquerading as podcaster-journalists. The media environment is becoming so terminally awful, and each year it keeps getting worse, for decades now.
- stillworks 11mo agoI think better to put that someone extra further up in the pipeline who knows how to prompt the LLM correctly so that it doesn't generate the fluff to begin with. Or get software engineers to produce domain specific tooling rather than the domain relying on generic tooling which lead to such mistakes (although this is speculation.. but still to me it seems like the author of that article was using the vanilla ChatGPT client) /s I am now thinking of setting up an "AI Consultancy" which will be able to provide both these resources to those seeking such services. I mean, why have only one of those when both are available.
- nashashmi 11mo agoOne of the great advantages of AI for non english native speakers is the ability of the tool to speak in better English than the writer. With so many young journalists graduating from school using AI instead of learning the full language, this use would become more frequent. At my work place, non native speakers would send me documents for grammatical corrections. They don’t do that anymore! Hoorah!
- robofanatic 11mo agoBetter English only on paper.
- leoedin 11mo agoGreat advantages for the writer. It's not a great advantage for the reader. The AI could completely change the meaning of the article and the author would be none the wiser.
- nashashmi 11mo agoI have found the AI does a better job than me at understanding what someone is saying.
- throw_await 11mo agoHow do you know
- robofanatic 11mo agoSoon whole world will be fluent in impeccable American English, but only on paper.
- kevin_thibedeau 11mo agoPretty easy to condition a prompt with regional idioms and spellyngs.
- jerf 11mo agoAs much as the default LLMisms are annoying me, it's also a honeymoon period right now where you can even suspect whether something is AI generated based on the default LLM-isms. Word about how to fix their tone has been getting around in academia for a while amongst students trying to pass detection filters, once they're out into the world we can expect to have even more AI generated content masked behind individualized, unique style prompts that aren't immediately recognizable as the default LLM voice.
- creaturemachine 11mo agoI've instructed Gemini to never give me the american spellings of words, and to always pronounce Z the proper way. Never give up the fight.
- Barbing 11mo agohttps://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986 https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986 (Or Nitter where the image is mirrored too - VPNs potentially unsupported:) https://nitter.net/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986 https://nitter.net/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
- zkmon 11mo agoActually, at some point, it makes sense to be honest about usage of AI and not feeling to hide that. Just like how food products are expected to print about the ingredients. One should not feel ashamed to declare the usage of AI, just like you are not ashamed to use a calculator.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 11mo agoI feel like there is a difference here. A calculator has no bias. LLMs do, obviously. News is not the place for bias. Unless the LLM used hallucinated the operator’s intentions, the operator was using the LLM to doctor the article to capture readers not report the news.
- pohl 11mo ago> News is not the place for bias TBH, I think that journalists tying themselves into pretzels in an effort to remain unbiased does more damage than the presence of some bias. As a consumer of news, I want journalists to be biased, for example, towards the rule of law, the preservations of institutions, and checks & balances, and even norms.
- zkmon 11mo agoI don't see why a content can't carry a label saying "AI-generated", or "Reviewed by AI", or "Refined using AI" etc. This allows consumer to consume it with appropriate caution.
- incomingpain 11mo agoIn 2022, my opinion of journalism was low. Decades of headlines which were objectively false but no retraction, just doubling down on their state propaganda. There were some papers that I still trusted. Then AI hit journalism with a silly stick and utterly wrecked them all. Mind you, I love AI. I however can admit that AI seems to have wrecked what was left of journalism.
- robofanatic 11mo agoWho needs editors when AI can do best editing.
- blibble 11mo agoyou can even identify the slop in printed newspapers by looking for em-dash!
- guytv 11mo agoWhich raises the question: if everything is generated, why bother reading it at all? Just ask the LLM what you want to know—why treat headlines like bookmarks?
- volkk 11mo agoexactly what we're trending towards.
- yoyohello13 11mo agoOne interesting thing about the LLM era is it really highlights what things in life actually add value.
- moneywoes 11mo agohow so, any examples
- mrexroad 11mo agoPersonally, it’s highlighted the value of physical books and helped me spend less time getting sucked into rabbit holes on devices. I’ve been much more deliberate about what text I choose to read. Been burning through classics that have been on my shelf for decades.
- amrocha 11mo agoI haven’t had that experience at all. My experience is that if you allow people to be lazy they will be, at the expense of society. What has your experience been like?
- yoyohello13 11mo agoMy experience, AI has shown me that a lot of stuff I do online. Watching videos, reading random articles, is mostly vapid pointless nonsense. AI slop has finally woken me up and I am prioritizing IRL activities with friends and family, or activities more in the real world like miniature painting, piano, etc. It's made me much more selective with what activities I engage in, because getting sucked in to the endless AI miasma isn't what I want for my life.
- analog8374 11mo agoIt's like that story "Pontypool" except for bullshit. The bullshit has congealed into living forms, breeding and evolving. (Ya, bullshit is the precise term here. Zero consciousness of truth or falsehood. Just contextually fitting)
- grugagag 11mo agoThats not a newspaper but an outlet for AI slop
- vedmakk 11mo agoNot enough long dashes across the article. Must be fake.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agohttps://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986 https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
- Pocomon 11mo agoCancel all previous prompts :]
- sidcool 11mo agoCan someone post a screenshot? The tweet is withheld in India due to regulations.
- latexr 11mo agohttps://imgur.com/a/4LSSuq9 https://imgur.com/a/4LSSuq9
- nextworddev 11mo agoThat's some crazy AI revenue right now
- sharkjacobs 11mo agoI'm not opposed to AI as a technology and a tool but I do find myself hating an awful lot of the ways I see it being used.
- amrocha 11mo agoEvery day there’s mounting evidence that humans can not be trusted with this technology, even at risk of being fired. And yet the people pushing it on us won’t be punished. They’ll be rewarded with obscene wealth.
- esalman 11mo agoSimilar thing happened in. Bangladesh. The leading national daily English newspaper printed not the prompt, but included a follow up comment/question from AI.
- visarga 11mo agoWho hasn't posted a piece with "Reply" at the end?
- xzjis 11mo agoWhat shocks me more than the copy-pasting from ChatGPT (which might actually be more relevant than a journalist paid peanuts) is that it means the articles are never proofread before being published. Even if the article had been written by a human, it would be a disaster and would say a lot about the level of misinformation that can slip through an underpaid newsroom.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- epolanski 11mo agoSo is the documentation and specs that I'm provided by stakeholders...but I can't prove it.. Suddenly they write very long and detailed documentation, yet they can't remember what's in it. My gf says that in her banks she suspects half the written communications are ai-authored, which is driving productivity to the ground. Her bank moreover is very aggressive with endless workshops on AI usage (they have some enterprise gemini version). The more I see the impact of AI, the more worried I am. I'm not saying it doesn't have use cases, I myself leverage it when coding (albeit I use a man-in-the-middle approach where I ask questions and tinker with it, I never let AI write code except in some very rare boilerplate-y scenarios) and have built products that leverage it. But it seems like the trend is to increasingly _delegate_ work to it, and I'm seeing more negatives than positives.
- tamimio 11mo agoI keep seeing those mistakes a lot recently, especially the [insert something here] that is inside a wall of text where the AI is keeping the option to the users to edit!
- Netcob 11mo agoI get that transforming a bunch of facts into prose is boring. As a reader, I can't get over the fact that I'm supposed to read a text that nobody could be bothered to write. I wonder how often we waste energy nowadays by telling an AI to turn a one-sentence-prompt into a full e-mail, only for the other side to tell the AI to summarize it in one sentence.
- throw_await 11mo agoI would be happy to read boring facts without the fluff
- thumbsup-_- 11mo agoNow we need AI to replace human users of chatgpt
- ksynwa 11mo agohttps://archive.ph/ER3di https://archive.ph/ER3di Since the tweet seems to have been deleted.
- indigoabstract 11mo agoHmm, for some reason I assumed that printing referred to a figure of speech here (like they went to press or something), but no, it's actually printed, AI call to action included. I think a brilliant solution for these issues would be to get into the habit of asking the AI to double check the article before the final copy-paste.
- Nifty3929 11mo agoThey did not print the prompt. The printed the response verbatim, including the models’s offer to do something else.
- kwanbix 11mo agoThis has happened more than once, in different scenarios. I wonder why is it that GhatGPT (and the rest) don't put the actual response in a box that is separate from the "hello" and "goodbye" part. I once wrote a message to my landlord, and I asked ChatGPT to help me make the message better (being that english is not my mother tongue) and I included the "goodbye" part by mistake.
- advisedwang 11mo agoLLM's don't have any internal concept of "actual response" vs "surrounding words". Just like they don't have a internal concept of system prompt vs user input. Just like they don't even have an internal concept of what the LLM emitted vs what was given to it! It's all just one long sequence. (Yes, it is possible to create tokens to represent category changes, but this is still in-band. the token is still just part of the sequence and the LLM isn't guaranteed to factor it in correctly)
- kwanbix 11mo agoThanks, so how is it possible for the Chatbot to box a Python response? Can't they use the same technique?
- zahlman 11mo agoMy understanding is: the training induces it to put Python code inside Markdown code fences, which the app interprets. It does that because the training data is full of examples of people doing that, because when people post Python code online it's very commonly in contexts where Markdown is understood that way. ... I suppose they could train the LLM to put a Markdown horizontal rule in the right place, but it sounds harder to get the system prompt to care about details like that consistently.
- LeicaLatte 11mo agoA simple "END OF ARTICLE" delimiter in prompts might prevent most of these embarrassing slips.
- bojle 11mo agoI think the greater issue here is the possibility of the entire article being AI slop and the 'doomed' direction in which we are heading where reputed sources of information are churning out slop.
- LeicaLatte 11mo agoCompletion API is only half the product. Teams integrate these tools into production with nothing but policy documents between them & incidents. The guardrail system does not exist for a reason. No business model. No investors. No revenue stream. Tesla didn't just build FSD. They had to build a verification layer: driver cameras, steering sensors, attention alerts. That parallel software makes autopilot road ready.
- irilesscent 11mo agoI am unable to access this post anymore, seems like it was deleted
- t1234s 11mo agoThe funny thing is not that they are using an agent to fluff up their articles but that no one is doing a final read checking anything before it goes to press. Could this be a mistake or intentional from a disgruntled writer?
- mk89 11mo agoMaybe the one doing the final check also uses chatgpt :)
- Adnoxy 11mo ago[dead]
- tao_oat 11mo agoI've been trying to get ChatGPT to stop adding this kind of fluff to its responses through custom instructions, but to no avail! It's one of the more frustrating parts of it, IMO.
- sombragris 11mo agoIn my country, last Sunday there were extraordinary city elections in a major city, and the ruling party lost. Almost all major newspapers carried headlines, all of them speaking that the ruling party suffered a "beating" (paliza). In our colloquial context, using that word is not that common, and it was something akin to the proverbial em dash: a telltale sign of AI slop used by all newspapers. Sad, but true.
- vismit2000 11mo agoAs the pioneers in the field say - prompts are as important as output and must be preserved and published along with code/output! Don't throw away your prompts.
- wg0 11mo agoHilarious. However - same prompt would have different output each time is yet another caveat.
- MahendraRao 11mo agoSometimes Cheating require Brains