7 ms·

People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsi

People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.

skybrian 8mo ago
I don’t see how you could know that without more information. Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes. It might just be careless. Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  we are fucking doomed holy shit we're really at the point where people are just writing off a journalist passing off their job to a chatgpt prompt as though that's a normal and defensible thing to be doing
  - maxbond 8mo ago
    No one said it was defensible. They drew a distinction between incompetence and malice. Let's not misquote each other here in the comments.
    - anonymous908213 8mo ago
      Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal that (ostensibly) exists for the reason of presenting factual information to readers, you are engaging in a second layer of malicious intent. It would take an astounding level of incompetence for a tech journal writer to not be aware of the fact that LLMs do not generate factual output reliably, and it beggars belief given that one of the authors has worked at Ars for 14 years. If they are that incompetent, they should probably be fired on that basis anyways. But even if they are that incompetent, that still only covers one half of their malicious intent.
      - maxbond 8mo ago
        The article in question appears to me to be written by a human (excluding what's in quotation marks), but of course neither of us has a crystal ball. Are there particular parts of it that you would flag as generated? Honestly I'm just not astounded by that level of incompetence. I'm not saying I'm impressed or that's it's okay. But I've heard much worse stories of journalistic malpractice. It's a topical, disposable article. Again, that doesn't justify anything, but it doesn't surprise me that a short summary of a series of forum exchanges and blog posts was low effort.
        anonymous908213 8mo ago
        I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era. I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a political journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to their readers to report facts.
        maxbond 8mo ago
        > I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice... That's more or less what I mean. It was only a few notches above listicle to begin with. I don't think they intended to fabricate quotes. I think they didn't take the necessary time because it's a low-stakes, low-quality article to begin with. With a short shelf life, so it's only valuable if published quickly. > I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. So your hypothesis is that they intentionally made up quotes that were pretty obviously going to be immediately spotted and damage their career? I don't think you think that, but I don't understand what the alternative you're proposing is. I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated. I get that you feel passionately about this, and you're right to be passionate about accuracy, but I think that may be leading you into ad-hoc argumentation rather than more rational appraisal of the facts. I think there's a stronger and more coherent argument for your position that you've not taken the time to flesh out. That isn't really a criticism and it isn't my business, but I do think you ought to be aware of it. I really want to stress that I don't think you're wrong to feel as you do and the author really did fuck up. I just feel we, as a community in this thread, are imputing things beyond what is in evidence and I'm trying to push back on that.
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  > Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes He covers AI for Ars Technica. Like, if he doesn't know that chatbots make shit up... FWIW I suspect that a lot of the problem here was that he was _working while he had a high fever_. This is a really bad idea.
anonymous908213 8mo ago
Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  > Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization. (My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)
  - jonny_eh 8mo ago
    > My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different Ya, they are quite different!
  - rsynnott 8mo ago
    In this case, the article was quoting a blog post, so presumably the editor (it _does_ look like there was one) took the arguably-not-unreasonable stance that _obviously_ the author wouldn't have fabricated quotes from a blog post they're literally linking to, that would be _insane_, nobody would do that. And thus that they didn't need to check. And that might be a semi-justifiable stance if dealing with a human. One of the many problems with our good friends the magic robots is that they don't just do incorrect stuff, they do _weird_ incorrect stuff, that a human would be unlikely to do, so it can fly under the radar.
blell 8mo ago
There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  Outsourcing your job as a journalist to a chatbot that you know for a fact falsifies quotes (and everything else it generates) is absolutely intentional.
  - furyofantares 8mo ago
    It's intentionally reckless, not intentionally harmful or intentionally falsifying quotes. I am sure they would have preferred if it hadn't falsified any quotes.
    - blactuary 8mo ago
      He's on the AI beat, if he is unaware that a chatbot will fabricate quotes and didn't verify them that is a level of reckless incompetence that warrants firing
      - furyofantares 8mo ago
        Yeah! We can call things reckless incompetence without calling them malice!
        3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
        The state of California can classify some driving under the influence cases as operating with "implied malice". Not sure it would qualify in this scenario, but there is precedent for arguing that reckless incompetence is malicious when it is done without regard for the consequences.
        deleted 8mo ago
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deleted 8mo ago
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jemmyw 8mo ago
That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions. The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
- andrewflnr 8mo ago
  > That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. Correct, I only mentioned the blame-free post-mortem thing to head off the usual excuses, as a shorthand for the general approach. It has merits in many/most circumstances. > I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, Again, correct. It's only appropriate in cases of malice.
  - yifanl 8mo ago
    Hanlon's razor is a farce. There are no unintentional acts, the drunk driver takes off because he thinks he has to get back as fast as possible, the sick man invokes AI to write his article because he must hit the deadline.
    - andrewflnr 8mo ago
      There are lots of unintentional acts, simply because fully predicting all the consequences of ones actions is genuinely difficult. I agree that drunk driving is not one; those consequences are well-known.
- singpolyma3 8mo ago
  Most of the time a firing is not a reasonable or helpful response to a mistake. This was not a mistake.
Ekaros 8mo ago
At this point anyone reporting on tech should know the problems with AI. As such even if AI is used for research and articles are written on that output by human there is still absolute unquestionable expectation to do the standard manual verification of facts. Not doing it is pure malice.
maxbond 8mo ago
I'm curious if you've read the author's Bluesky statement (which wasn't available when you made your comment) and what you think of it?
- andrewflnr 8mo ago
  I'll admit that at least looks consistent with extreme carelessness rather than lying. I don't find it terribly convincing, though. I find it a suspiciously long chain of excuses perfectly calibrated to excuse the events. The description gets vague right at the critical point where AI output gets laundered into journalistic output, and the part about the tool being strictly to gather "verbatim source material" sounds like the narrow end of a wedge of excuses for something that actually doesn't do that. But I don't have the background to tell with confidence whether he's lying. If it turns out he's not, well, I'd feel a little bad, but I still wouldn't respect him. I certainly stand by my broader claim that lying is fireable.
  - maxbond 8mo ago
    Well I appreciate you taking the time to respond and acknowledge the new evidence. I agree with the broad point that dishonesty can't be tolerated in a newsroom. And it's a "Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach" situation, the appearance of dishonesty is very bad regardless of the reality. And despite what Orland claims I do think there's blame to go around for not catching the mistake (assuming we accept his account). For what it's worth, the post below talks about experimenting with Claude Code but also having COVID in December. I don't know what to think of that, I did work with a guy who just kept catching COVID (or at least he said that and I believed him, I didn't swab him personally or anything), but it is weird for him to have COVID in December and February. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-th...
    - andrewflnr 8mo ago
      The specific disease is the least weird part of that story. Whatever the degree of truth in his statement, some absurd series of events occurred.
strken 8mo ago
Blameless post-mortems work really well when you use them to fix process issues. In this case, you'd identify issues like "not all quotes are fact checked because our submissions to editorial staff don't require sources and the checklist doesn't require fact checks", "the journalist worked while sick because we were understaffed", "nothing should ever be copy-pasted from an LLM", etc.

skybrian 8mo ago

I don’t see how you could know that without more information. Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes. It might just be careless. Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.

anonymous908213 8mo ago
we are fucking doomed holy shit we're really at the point where people are just writing off a journalist passing off their job to a chatgpt prompt as though that's a normal and defensible thing to be doing
- maxbond 8mo ago
  No one said it was defensible. They drew a distinction between incompetence and malice. Let's not misquote each other here in the comments.
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal that (ostensibly) exists for the reason of presenting factual information to readers, you are engaging in a second layer of malicious intent. It would take an astounding level of incompetence for a tech journal writer to not be aware of the fact that LLMs do not generate factual output reliably, and it beggars belief given that one of the authors has worked at Ars for 14 years. If they are that incompetent, they should probably be fired on that basis anyways. But even if they are that incompetent, that still only covers one half of their malicious intent.
    - maxbond 8mo ago
      The article in question appears to me to be written by a human (excluding what's in quotation marks), but of course neither of us has a crystal ball. Are there particular parts of it that you would flag as generated? Honestly I'm just not astounded by that level of incompetence. I'm not saying I'm impressed or that's it's okay. But I've heard much worse stories of journalistic malpractice. It's a topical, disposable article. Again, that doesn't justify anything, but it doesn't surprise me that a short summary of a series of forum exchanges and blog posts was low effort.
      - anonymous908213 8mo ago
        I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era. I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a political journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to their readers to report facts.
        maxbond 8mo ago
        > I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice... That's more or less what I mean. It was only a few notches above listicle to begin with. I don't think they intended to fabricate quotes. I think they didn't take the necessary time because it's a low-stakes, low-quality article to begin with. With a short shelf life, so it's only valuable if published quickly. > I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. So your hypothesis is that they intentionally made up quotes that were pretty obviously going to be immediately spotted and damage their career? I don't think you think that, but I don't understand what the alternative you're proposing is. I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated. I get that you feel passionately about this, and you're right to be passionate about accuracy, but I think that may be leading you into ad-hoc argumentation rather than more rational appraisal of the facts. I think there's a stronger and more coherent argument for your position that you've not taken the time to flesh out. That isn't really a criticism and it isn't my business, but I do think you ought to be aware of it. I really want to stress that I don't think you're wrong to feel as you do and the author really did fuck up. I just feel we, as a community in this thread, are imputing things beyond what is in evidence and I'm trying to push back on that.
rsynnott 8mo ago
> Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes He covers AI for Ars Technica. Like, if he doesn't know that chatbots make shit up... FWIW I suspect that a lot of the problem here was that he was _working while he had a high fever_. This is a really bad idea.

anonymous908213 8mo ago

Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.

chasd00 8mo ago
> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization. (My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)
- jonny_eh 8mo ago
  > My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different Ya, they are quite different!
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  In this case, the article was quoting a blog post, so presumably the editor (it _does_ look like there was one) took the arguably-not-unreasonable stance that _obviously_ the author wouldn't have fabricated quotes from a blog post they're literally linking to, that would be _insane_, nobody would do that. And thus that they didn't need to check. And that might be a semi-justifiable stance if dealing with a human. One of the many problems with our good friends the magic robots is that they don't just do incorrect stuff, they do _weird_ incorrect stuff, that a human would be unlikely to do, so it can fly under the radar.

blell 8mo ago

There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.

anonymous908213 8mo ago
Outsourcing your job as a journalist to a chatbot that you know for a fact falsifies quotes (and everything else it generates) is absolutely intentional.
- furyofantares 8mo ago
  It's intentionally reckless, not intentionally harmful or intentionally falsifying quotes. I am sure they would have preferred if it hadn't falsified any quotes.
  - blactuary 8mo ago
    He's on the AI beat, if he is unaware that a chatbot will fabricate quotes and didn't verify them that is a level of reckless incompetence that warrants firing
    - furyofantares 8mo ago
      Yeah! We can call things reckless incompetence without calling them malice!
      - 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
        The state of California can classify some driving under the influence cases as operating with "implied malice". Not sure it would qualify in this scenario, but there is precedent for arguing that reckless incompetence is malicious when it is done without regard for the consequences.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

jemmyw 8mo ago

That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions. The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.

andrewflnr 8mo ago
> That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. Correct, I only mentioned the blame-free post-mortem thing to head off the usual excuses, as a shorthand for the general approach. It has merits in many/most circumstances. > I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, Again, correct. It's only appropriate in cases of malice.
- yifanl 8mo ago
  Hanlon's razor is a farce. There are no unintentional acts, the drunk driver takes off because he thinks he has to get back as fast as possible, the sick man invokes AI to write his article because he must hit the deadline.
  - andrewflnr 8mo ago
    There are lots of unintentional acts, simply because fully predicting all the consequences of ones actions is genuinely difficult. I agree that drunk driving is not one; those consequences are well-known.
singpolyma3 8mo ago
Most of the time a firing is not a reasonable or helpful response to a mistake. This was not a mistake.

Ekaros 8mo ago

At this point anyone reporting on tech should know the problems with AI. As such even if AI is used for research and articles are written on that output by human there is still absolute unquestionable expectation to do the standard manual verification of facts. Not doing it is pure malice.

maxbond 8mo ago

I'm curious if you've read the author's Bluesky statement (which wasn't available when you made your comment) and what you think of it?

andrewflnr 8mo ago
I'll admit that at least looks consistent with extreme carelessness rather than lying. I don't find it terribly convincing, though. I find it a suspiciously long chain of excuses perfectly calibrated to excuse the events. The description gets vague right at the critical point where AI output gets laundered into journalistic output, and the part about the tool being strictly to gather "verbatim source material" sounds like the narrow end of a wedge of excuses for something that actually doesn't do that. But I don't have the background to tell with confidence whether he's lying. If it turns out he's not, well, I'd feel a little bad, but I still wouldn't respect him. I certainly stand by my broader claim that lying is fireable.
- maxbond 8mo ago
  Well I appreciate you taking the time to respond and acknowledge the new evidence. I agree with the broad point that dishonesty can't be tolerated in a newsroom. And it's a "Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach" situation, the appearance of dishonesty is very bad regardless of the reality. And despite what Orland claims I do think there's blame to go around for not catching the mistake (assuming we accept his account). For what it's worth, the post below talks about experimenting with Claude Code but also having COVID in December. I don't know what to think of that, I did work with a guy who just kept catching COVID (or at least he said that and I believed him, I didn't swab him personally or anything), but it is weird for him to have COVID in December and February. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-things-i-learned-from-burning-myself-out-with-ai-coding-agents/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-th...
  - andrewflnr 8mo ago
    The specific disease is the least weird part of that story. Whatever the degree of truth in his statement, some absurd series of events occurred.

strken 8mo ago

Blameless post-mortems work really well when you use them to fix process issues. In this case, you'd identify issues like "not all quotes are fact checked because our submissions to editorial staff don't require sources and the checklist doesn't require fact checks", "the journalist worked while sick because we were understaffed", "nothing should ever be copy-pasted from an LLM", etc.