25 ms·
Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- ab_testing 7mo agoSo they fired that author after the author had publicly apologized on Blue sky.
- coldtea 7mo ago"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.
- bwbwbwbw 7mo ago[dead]
- bingaweek 7mo agoWhat 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 7mo agoCan you name any other way for Ars Technica to handle this situation without permanently soiling their reputation?
- Marsymars 7mo agoThat'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 7mo agoHe 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 7mo agoWhy would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?
- skygazer 7mo agoIs 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 7mo ago"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 7mo agoGroan, 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 7mo agoMaybe it's plagiarism because he did not attribute the LLM output to the LLM.
- danso 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- bandrami 7mo agoThat absolutely should be career-ending for a journalist, apology or no
- etchalon 7mo agoNot "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).
- bandrami 7mo agoHow is it not "outright fabrication"? Quotes were attributed to a subject that he didn't say. That's fabrication.
- landl0rd 7mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago> senior AI reporter A true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM output than anyone else.
- zmmmmm 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI dunno. If AI doesn't write your articles, are you even an AI reporter? Sorry, I never could resist a good dad joke
- Revanche1367 7mo agoSo 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 7mo ago4 times, you forgot the owner of the bot that did the PR.
- Revanche1367 7mo agoIndeed, you’re right.
- zarflax 7mo agoNo, the journalist came in and slandered the LLM Twice and Jim Fell.
- gdulli 7mo ago"Who are you, and how did you lose your job?" "I'm an AI reporter. And, I'm an AI reporter."
- sparky_z 7mo agoHe 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".
- th0ma5 7mo ago[dead]
- 7mo ago
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago“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 7mo ago"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-fabricated-quotes-about-ai-generated-article/ https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoIs 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 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- sl0pmaestro 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoContext from earlier discussion of the article being pulled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
- dang 7mo agoThanks! 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145 - Feb 2026 (501 comments) OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)
- vadansky 7mo agoGood time to watch Shattered Glass. Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.
- thomassmith65 7mo agoIt's an excellent movie, regardless. "When this thing blows there isn't going to be a magazine anymore!" https://youtube.com/watch?v=oj79mp2WEx0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=oj79mp2WEx0
- jackyli02 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoThe core story is literally about how AI made up facts. The solution is more of the same?
- neya 7mo ago[flagged]
- dang 7mo agoWould 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kittikitti 7mo ago"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 7mo agoSorry but I don't follow
- neya 7mo ago> 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 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223723
- neya 7mo agoOk, some of the stuff - like calling out the community for NPC behaviour (aggressively), I wasn't aware was in the guidelines, but it totally makes sense. Won't happen again. The Ars Technica one? Screw them. That's on me. But, like you said, I do owe it to the community to not turn it into a reddit thread, so, I will be mindful next time. Thanks, dang.
- sl0pmaestro 7mo agoHappy 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoSometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know how to say no.
- epistasis 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoTheir 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 7mo agoVery 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!
- internet2000 7mo ago[flagged]
- jmyeet 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI've never seen anyone here claim that AI never hallucinates or can't provide incorrect information.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoIt's really easy to prove existence of a thing by showing the thing. Or, maybe, you hallucinated it?
- gertop 7mo agoI'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 7mo ago>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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoNeither 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoIANAL, but those facts could support "fired", or "resigned", or "short-term contract not renewed", or probably other stuff.
- dust-jacket 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoFor 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoThat'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 7mo ago> 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.
- aidenn0 7mo agoBut an institutional push can make bad workers drive out the good.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- raincole 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoIt'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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoYou can see the fall in real time - half the sources are also dubious AI slop now and that number’s only growing :-/
- Gigachad 7mo agoAt 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 7mo agoI 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?
- Barrin92 7mo agopeople 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-me/ 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 7mo agoI 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?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- bragr 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoJournalists 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 7mo agoyou'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 7mo agoIt 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 7mo agoAll 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.
- breput 7mo agoAs 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.
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoI think you have far too much faith in the process for the big media sites
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- spppedury 7mo ago[dead]
- AceJohnny2 7mo ago> That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that are among the best in their fields I miss Maggie Koerth & Jon Stokes
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fp64 7mo agoSad 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoCircumstances can help explain, but never excuse unethical behavior
- SideburnsOfDoom 7mo agoSystems can make such failures inevitable. The language of "blame" vs. "excuse" is not the most relevant.
- fp64 7mo agoAre 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 7mo agoNo. That's a wild gallop off in a pointless direction using the same irrelevant language.
- shadowgovt 7mo agoThat 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 7mo ago>The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica I despise Conde Nast
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoThey have. Some paper journals even have a dedicated space in early pages (2-3) for corrections and retractation.
- rsynnott 7mo agoThis 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoThis is more akin to "looking into your ex's private data at work" than "made a mistake that caused a production outage"
- deleted 7mo ago
- ModernMech 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoWhich version? I just tested mine and it replied with an actual quote
- ModernMech 7mo agoThe 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."
- kolinko 7mo agoFull version or free version? Most conplaints people make, I found, was because they use the free version.
- gigatexal 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoAre 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 7mo agoYou 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoIf 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 7mo agoReally 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.
- itvision 7mo ago[flagged]
- hnarn 7mo agoCalling Ars Technica "woke far left" is crazy, the U.S. really is lost to complete fractionalist brainrot.
- itvision 7mo agoI'm not from the US and I'm not bipartisan; in fact, I find the bipartisan US to be extremely backwards, illogical, and detrimental to the whole nation.
- AlexeyBelov 7mo agoTrue, but this user is Russian. But otherwise you're right, it's essentially the same brainrot.
- DaanDL 7mo agoI hope you will too escape from your echo chamber.
- itvision 7mo agoI love facts, reasoning, and logic and I'm not known for being biased or opinionated, something that the Ars comments section has become where unpopular points of view are downvoted to hell. AI is mocked even though the vast majority of Ars commenters have extensively been using chatbots for years. You know how it's called? Hypocrisy.
- cubefox 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoIs 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoHow 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 7mo ago> 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.
- maplethorpe 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoIt's another way of saying "dog ate my homework".
- WesolyKubeczek 7mo agoSo this is another way how you can lose your job because of AI.
- arizen 7mo ago"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet" -Isaac Newton
- renegade-otter 7mo agoMan, 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoTo 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo ago> ...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 7mo agoThe irony is Ars readers tend to be fairly anti LLM in the comments of every article
- HardwareLust 7mo ago"He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.” Yeah, no.
- arashsadrieh 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- angelfangs 7mo agoIn a post gamergate world dunno why people still rate Conde Nasty
- gracelynewhouse 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago[flagged]
- bsimpson 7mo agoI 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.
- Traster 7mo agoIs your process mechnical or AI based. Ie, is it "Hey claude there's this citation, can you tell me which case it's from" and if it matches you accept. Or is it "advanced-grep-style-thing <text in citation> <caseid.txt>"?
- xpe 7mo agoWhat you've described seems like a better process than most, by far. > This is exactly why every AI citation we publish goes through a blocker. Who is "we"? Kudos! > What guard rails have other people put in front of AI-written judgements? A great question. Some 'classic' responses here relate to (a) inter-notator agreement [1]; (b) debate [2]; (c) decomposition / deconstruction [3]; and lots more... computer science is all well and good, but philosophy has studied these topics for thousands of years! Epistemology, in particular, totally slays. I would also generalize the question: what guard-rails do we need in front of any and all writing? Presumably there is some generative process behind it, but I assume very little now-a-days. Even before the last several years of transformer-fueled mayhem, my confidence even in "highly intelligent" and college-educated people dropped sharply. Talk is cheap, and some people like to talk more than others -- often the kinds of people that I don't find value in listening to. [1]: Inter-annotator agreement : http://ron.artstein.org/publications/inter-annotator-preprint.pdf http://ron.artstein.org/publications/inter-annotator-preprin... [2]: AI Safety via Debate : https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00899 https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00899 [3]: Fact in fragments: Deconstructing complex claims via LLM-based atomic fact extraction and verification : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0957417425041879 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09574...
- flerchin 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoI bought a handmade arcade-style SNES controller from this guy one time. He should go back to making those, I guess.
- yesterdayjones 7mo agoThese 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.
- adrian-vega 7mo ago[dead]
- Traster 7mo agoAt the end of the day it's obviously the right decision to fire him. You can't drop your ethics when you feel sick.
- flashbaby 7mo ago[flagged]