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Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes
- Chinjut 8mo agoGood lord, even the apology is AI generated: "That was not just careless—it was wrong." https://pressanddemocracy.substack.com/p/i-am-admitting-my-mistake https://pressanddemocracy.substack.com/p/i-am-admitting-my-m...
- intended 8mo agoI’m tempted to agree, but this is a case where I think there’s more human than AI. Maybe he used LLMs for a bit, and changed parts of it. Maybe he is patient zero for LLM speak?
- rsynnott 8mo agoParticularly given that the dreaded em-dash is not commonly used in Irish or UK English; it’s mostly a US English thing.
- microtonal 8mo agoThe original (?) apology in Dutch does not use em-dashes: https://steady.page/en/journalistiekondervuur/posts/dd6e066f-36d2-4915-b3af-d9faa6174810 https://steady.page/en/journalistiekondervuur/posts/dd6e066f...
- rsynnott 8mo agoOh, I had completely missed that he’d done this in a Dutch paper too. All I’d heard of it previously was that his articles had been pulled by the Irish Independent, so I was expecting the apology to be in English.
- hvb2 8mo agoI think his apology was actually written in Dutch so this might be a translation that was automated? Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peter-vandermeersch-a4381b30_ik-trek-het-boetekleed-aan-activity-7440424431992311808-I9jm/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/peter-vandermeersch-a4381b30_...
- nothrabannosir 8mo agoIt is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact. Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.” English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.” I’d say the only difference is the em dash. Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.
- hvb2 8mo agoI'm not disagreeing it's a bad translation. Just saying that it's not the source
- nothrabannosir 8mo agoI mean that whatever signal you think you get from the sentence structure was not introduced by (potentially) automated translation. The sentence structure is precisely the same in the original Dutch.
- the_biot 8mo agoHis non-apology apology even follows a familiar pattern: I wrote it myself but just used AI for some help, and it inserted false quotes! Bad tech! But I have now learned my lesson! Very similar to what a rector recently wrote when she got busted giving an AI-generated speech in her inaugural speech in her new university job. None of it is true, of course. These people are just sorry they got caught.
- phreack 8mo ago> “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.” What? Irresistible quotes? This betrays a terrible way of thinking as a journalist. Basically an admission of wanting to fake news that'd sound good. At that point just write fiction.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- sofixa 8mo ago> Basically an admission of wanting to fake news that'd sound good How did you read that? Something sounding good and making sense and you wanting it to be true doesn't mean you'd fake it.
- Obscurity4340 8mo agoCant you, like, ask or instruct it to create a bibliography with the citations or at least put the source of any quotes next to it for reviewing purposes?
- abaieorro 8mo ago> I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases Journalists were doing this for decades. Stitching and editing words out of context, to put words into peoples mouths! I will take AI halucinations over journalists halucinations anytime, at least machine has no hostile intent, and is making a geunine error!
- hulitu 8mo ago> I will take AI halucinations over journalists halucinations anytime, at least machine has no hostile intent, Famous last words. What do you think is the main application for AI ? Spreading propaganda.
- garciansmith 8mo agoThe idea that somehow AI is magically unbiased and not influenced by those making it is incorrect.
- mmooss 8mo agoThey said earlier that they didn't verify the quotes. I understand them to mean that the LLM outputted text that included quotes. They assumed the output was accurate and found it so appealing, on an emotional level, that they just went with it without checking. The most valuable lesson here, by far, is not about other people but about ourselves. This person is trained, takes it seriously, and advocates for making sure the AI is supervised, and got caught in the emotional manipulation of LLM design [0]. We all are at risk. If we look at the other person and mock them, and think we are better than them, we are only exposing ourselves to more risk. If we think - oh my goodness, look what happened, this is perilous - then we gain from what happened and can protect ourselves. (We might also ask why this valuable tool also includes such manipulative interface. Don't take it for granted; it's not at all necessary for LLMs to work, and they could just as easily sound like a-holes.) [0] I mean that obviously they are carefully designed to sound appealing
- PeterStuer 8mo ago"Journalism" over here seems to have died a long time ago. Most if not all of the former "quality newspapers" unfortunately seem to have devolved into what could be more accurately described as "pro regime activist blogs".
- hvb2 8mo agoIf by "over here" you mean the US, that sounds about right. Can be summed up succinctly into "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
- PeterStuer 8mo agoEU is actually just as bad
- hvb2 8mo agoYou want to back that up with evidence? Your defense secretary the other day said, responding to a news article he didn't like: "the sooner Ellison buys it the better" [1]. I don't think this kind of media control happens anywhere in Europe, but prove me wrong. Unless you're talking about former Soviet countries, that is part of Europe but culturally actually very different and much more aligned with Russia than all of western Europe 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/media/pete-hegseth-david-ellison-cnn.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/media/pete-hegse...
- camillomiller 8mo agoI have witnessed in person what LLMs have done to the mind of seemingly intelligent people. It’s a disaster.
- cinntaile 8mo agoDon't leave us hanging. What happened?
- dude250711 8mo agoThey stop thinking and they stop verifying output too.
- camillomiller 8mo agoA CTO sent me a message that opened with: “Here’s a friendly message that will perfectly convey what you want to say”. A double PhD friend says she has to talk to chatGPT for all sort of advice and can’t feel safe not doing it, “because you know I’m single and don’t have a companion to spitball my ideas”. She let chatGPT decide which way to take to get to a certain island, and she got stranded because the suggested service didn’t exist. I have more examples. It’s a fucking mind virus.
- sigseg1v 8mo agoHow is the getting stranded example different than asking on a travel forum how to get somewhere, and an active and well intentioned user that isn't familiar with your area of travel answers, gives you wrong instructions, and you get lost?
- kibwen 8mo agoBecause the vast and overwhelmingly majority of the time, if you ask a question into the ether that nobody has a good answer to, most people will gloss over it and not bother answering, as attested by decades of relatable memes ( https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ ). In contrast, the chatbot is trained to always attempt to give an answer, and is seemingly disincentivized via its training set to just shrug and say "I don't know, good luck fam".
- intended 8mo agoLooking at the media ecosystem at large, gives me a case of gallows humor. In some sections of the ecosystem, firms still penalize journalists for errors. In other sections, checking reduces the velocity of attention grabbing headlines. The difference in treatment is… farcical. We need more good journalists, and more good journalism - but we no longer have ways to subsidize such work. Ads / classifieds are dead, and revenue accrues to only a few. I have no idea how we square this circle.
- PeterStuer 8mo agoWe can't square this circle. It's why they're all A/B flipping headlines (resulting in the most deranged partisan clickbait), killed of their (too expensive) redactions (especially international news), rely solely on (barely) rewriting AP, Reuters and PRNewswire, and fill their site with opinion rather than factual reporting in support of gov handouts to the sector.
- ashwinnair99 8mo agoThe tool didn't fail here, the person did. An experienced journalist should know better. Editorial review exists for exactly this reason, if you skip it, this is what happens.
- microtonal 8mo agoBut the article said he published it in his own Substack newsletter, I am assuming that it is not under editorial control, since it is personal?
- clydethefrog 8mo agoSome of these newsletters were also edited and published in opinion pages of the Mediahuis publications.
- Hendrikto 8mo ago> The tool didn't fail here, the person did Both failed.
- maxrmk 8mo agoIronic coming from the Guardian. One of their journalists consistently publishes ai slop and the paper is in denial about it. https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/2023089526445371777?s=46 https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/2023089526445371777?s=46
- zarzavat 8mo agoIt doesn't seem AI generated to me. Are we at the point where you have to write in a particularly outrageous style in order to not be accused of using AI?
- maxrmk 8mo agoFair enough. It reads as extremely AI generated to me. But that isn’t completely reliable.
- gruez 8mo ago>Are we at the point where you have to write in a particularly outrageous style in order to not be accused of using AI? I don't think we've gotten to the extent that all popular writing styles (eg. hamburger paragraphs) are considered suspect, but the "it's not just X, it's Y" construction[1] attracts particular scrutiny. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Negative_parallelisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
- philipp-gayret 8mo agoThis is either ChatGPT or the one journalist who influenced all of ChatGPT's writing style.
- gruez 8mo agoIf you look at the replies[1] to that tweet, many commenters point out his style was entirely different prior to chatgpt. [1] https://xcancel.com/maxwelltani/status/2023089526445371777 https://xcancel.com/maxwelltani/status/2023089526445371777?
- crop_rotation 8mo agoHN is full of people saying ABCD should know better and honestly I thought the same, but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly. People get defensive when I point out out to them that ChatGPT will make things up and it is widely know, and some even tell me it is the fault of "tech people" for not fixing it and they can't be expected to double check every chatgpt conversation. So I am very sure this problem is more prevalent than what we see and also that it is going to continue increasing.
- doctorpangloss 8mo agoon the flip side, so much chatgpt usage, full of flaws, doesn't seem to really matter in various "critical domains." you can't generalize "critical."
- joe_mamba 8mo ago>but when I look at almost all of my friends working in critical domains like as a judge or engineer or lawyer or even doctor, they seem to trust ChatGPT more or less blindly That's why I lost trust and faith in people who end up in positions of doctor, lawyer or judge. When I was young I used to think they must be the smartest most high-IQ people in society, having read the most books and have the highest levels of critical thinking and debate skills ever. When in fact they were only good at memorizing and regurgitating the right information that the school required to pass the exam that gave them that prestigious title and that's it. Now in my mid 30's when I talk to people from these professions at a beer, barbeque or any other casual gathering, I realize they're really not that sharp or well read or immune propaganda and misinformation, and anyone could be in their place if they put in the grind work at the right time. It's a miracle our society functions at all.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoYour friends should know better. That their behavior is prevalent does not contradict that.
- crop_rotation 8mo ago
- shahbaby 8mo ago> That was not just careless – it was wrong lol
- tobr 8mo agoInteresting to note how similar this seems to what happened with Benj Edwards at Ars Technica. AI was used to extract or summarize information, and quotes found in the summary were then used as source material for the final writing and never double checked against the actual source. I’ve run into a similar problem myself - working with a big transcript, I asked an AI to pull out passages that related to a certain topic, and only because of oddities in the timestamps extracted did I realize that most of the quotes did not exist in the source at all.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoThis seems like a solved problem. Any RAG interface I design I have links to the original source and passage. Even NotebookLM does this.
- mh- 8mo agoFor the curious, the term of art is Grounding. e.g.: https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/grounding/overview https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/g...
- Planktonne 8mo agoIt was already a solved problem with cmd/ctrl + f.
- tobr 8mo agoIt might be a solved problem in the sense that it has a possible solution, but not in the sense that it doesn’t happen with the tools most people would expect to be able to handle the task.
- smcin 8mo agoAlready posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449126
- skygazer 8mo agoOut of curiosity, if you asked for the same text extraction multiple times, each inside fresh contexts, is it likely to fabricate unique quotes each time? And if so, a) might that be a procedure we train humans to do to better understand LLM unreliability, and 2) and instrumentalize the behavior to measure answer overlap with non LLM statistical tools? Also, quote-presence testing/linking against source would seem to be a trivial layer to build on a chat interface, no LLM required. Just highlight and link the longest common strings.