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The bigger problem is that he felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever. Makes me wonder about Ars Technica's company
by bojan 8mo ago
The bigger problem is that he felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever.
Makes me wonder about Ars Technica's company culture.
- 0_____0 8mo agoHave you met any professional journos? It's not exactly a laid back profession. I could easily imagine the people I know pushing through illness to get a story out.
- wavemode 8mo agotbh that's the least surprising aspect of this. Most journalists do not have work-life balance.
- robocat 8mo ago> felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever You are assuming that... He says he currently has a fever. But was he sick when he wrote the article? That is not so clear.
- mzajc 8mo agoHe was, it's in the first paragraph > I have been sick with COVID all week /../, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.
- epolanski 8mo agoThat's words, not facts.
- fooqux 8mo ago> That's words, not facts. Ok, what sort of facts would you accept here?
- imron 8mo agoHow do you unintentionally use an AI to help you write an article?
- cwillu 8mo agoA fever can cause altered mental states, confusion, etc. It's not surprising that someone suffering from one would act out of character.
- rsynnott 8mo agoYeah, personally with a high fever I’d say I’m more impaired than when I’m drunk. It’s not a state people should be doing anything important in.
- bayindirh 8mo agoBeing under stress and being ill at the same time can change your modus operandi. I know, because that happens to me, too. When I'm too tired, too stupid, and too stressed, I stop after a point. Otherwise things go bad. Being sick adds extra mental fog, so I try to stop sooner. Being aware of it needs some effort, though.
- ThePowerOfFuet 8mo agoRead the article. The use of AI was not accidental, but how the output was used was.
- jweather 8mo agoPaste the original blog post into ChatGPT asking it to summarize or provide suggestions. Unintentionally copy and paste quotes from the ChatGPT output rather than the original blog post.
- sli 8mo agoI agree that the work culture promoting this is bad, but being sick is still simply not an excuse to fabricate quotes with AI. It's still just journalistic malfeasance, and if Ars actually cares about the quality of their journalism, he should be fired for it.
- lemontheme 8mo agoShould he? Where does that mindset come from? The author has owned up to his mistake. Unless there is a pattern here, why would we not prefer to let him learn and grow from this? We all get to accidentally drop the prod DB once, since that’s what teaches us not to do it again.
- PoorlyNamed 8mo agoHe's not some junior developer with his first job, he's the senior editor. If a senior editor plagiarized an article, he would rightly be fired because it's a serious violation of journalistic ethics. He knew using AI tools like that was against company policy and he did it anyway. That's well beyond just making a mistake.
- etempleton 8mo agoThere are degrees of plagiarism and you could argue this is not really plagiarism at all. Paraphrasing instead of directly quoting is probably about as mild as it can get. Most publications wouldn’t even note the mistake.
- starkparker 8mo agoThis wasn't paraphrasing either. The tool couldn't access the subject's website and instead fabricated quotes, which Benj nor anyone in the editorial process bothered to vet.
- bayindirh 8mo ago> he should be fired for it. If anyone who makes a mistake rarely and owns it completely shall be fired, everyone would be homeless. To err is human, so owning what you did. This is the first time I have seen Ars to make a mistake of this kind in any size, so I think this is a good corrective bump given Ars' track report on these matters. Maybe we should learn to be a bit flexible and understanding sometimes. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and we don't need more of that right now.