3 ms·

Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/p

Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
sva_ 8mo ago
Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
- belter 8mo ago
  He did not even mentioned the Dow...
- vor_ 8mo ago
  What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    Not say anything at all.
    - DonHopkins 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  - m-hodges 8mo ago
    We operate in an information environment where this is exceedingly rare. Shame is hard to come by these days.
  - oenton 8mo ago
    The DOW is at 50,000! 50,000! If you get this reference (and even if you don’t), there are many alternative actions he could have taken, including not acknowledging this at all.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hluska 8mo ago
  I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was: 1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy. 2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT. 3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes. I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing. That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention. As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
  - gwern 8mo ago
    I think there's still something missing here. This is a strange place for ChatGPT to confabulate quotes: extracting short quotes from a short text blog post is about easy as it gets these days. GPT-5.2 Pro can handle tens of thousands of words for me before I start to notice any small omissions or confabulations, and this was confabulating all that at just 1.5k words? So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.
- emptyfile 8mo ago
  [dead]
driggs 8mo ago
Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes. He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.
petterroea 8mo ago
Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?
- randallsquared 8mo ago
  Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.
  - rsynnott 8mo ago
    As someone who has deadlines, and is occasionally sick, if I have a high fever I am not working. Nor would my manager thank me for it if I did. If you have a high fever, you’re mentally impaired and shouldn’t be doing anything important if it can possibly be avoided.
- stevekemp 8mo ago
  There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies. So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick. (And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)
  - petterroea 8mo ago
    Thank you for the explanation.
    - JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
      During COVID my company had mandatory days off (I think 14) if you reported any COVID symptoms. Those days were unpaid of course. The cherry on top is the people paid the lowest were the ones who couldn't work from home and were most likely to get COVID. This was pretty common at other places too.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

sva_ 8mo ago

Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.

belter 8mo ago
He did not even mentioned the Dow...
vor_ 8mo ago
What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
- overfeed 8mo ago
  Not say anything at all.
  - DonHopkins 8mo ago
    [flagged]
- m-hodges 8mo ago
  We operate in an information environment where this is exceedingly rare. Shame is hard to come by these days.
- oenton 8mo ago
  The DOW is at 50,000! 50,000! If you get this reference (and even if you don’t), there are many alternative actions he could have taken, including not acknowledging this at all.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hluska 8mo ago
I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was: 1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy. 2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT. 3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes. I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing. That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention. As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
- gwern 8mo ago
  I think there's still something missing here. This is a strange place for ChatGPT to confabulate quotes: extracting short quotes from a short text blog post is about easy as it gets these days. GPT-5.2 Pro can handle tens of thousands of words for me before I start to notice any small omissions or confabulations, and this was confabulating all that at just 1.5k words? So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.
emptyfile 8mo ago
[dead]

driggs 8mo ago

Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes. He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.

petterroea 8mo ago

Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?

randallsquared 8mo ago
Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  As someone who has deadlines, and is occasionally sick, if I have a high fever I am not working. Nor would my manager thank me for it if I did. If you have a high fever, you’re mentally impaired and shouldn’t be doing anything important if it can possibly be avoided.
stevekemp 8mo ago
There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies. So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick. (And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)
- petterroea 8mo ago
  Thank you for the explanation.
  - JohnnyMarcone 8mo ago
    During COVID my company had mandatory days off (I think 14) if you reported any COVID symptoms. Those days were unpaid of course. The cherry on top is the people paid the lowest were the ones who couldn't work from home and were most likely to get COVID. This was pretty common at other places too.