9 ms·

Our newsroom AI policy

212 points by zdw 6mo ago

gnabgib 6mo ago
Doesn't need Ars Technica added to the title
ares623 6mo ago
Trust, reputation, and credibility will become (even more of) a premium.
legitster 6mo ago
AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when asking Claude for instructions in taking apart my dryer. There was literally only one webpage on the internet left with instructions for my particular dryer - the page was more or less unusable with rotten links and riddled with adware. Claude did it's best but filled in the missing diagrams with hallucinations. I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. It might not be a lot of money, but it would certainly be more than the pitiful ad revenue you get from posting content online right now. And if I want to upload corrected instructions for repairing this dryer I would have reason to.
- ares623 6mo ago
  > I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As a software user I wish I could do the same for all the software I use.
  - Jach 6mo ago
    Many open source projects accept donations. There's also explicitly paid-for software. What exactly do you wish for that you can't do right now?
    - ares623 6mo ago
      Specifically the part where engineers get paid the same way as artists on Spotify.
      - techpression 6mo ago
        So not at all for their work and with a reverse Robin Hood model? That would be terrible for software. The way artists gets paid on streaming is a genius play at catering to the biggest artists and labels and screw over the smaller ones, especially true on Spotify with their freemium model
      - Loughla 6mo ago
        So a handful will make a buttload but the vast majority won't make enough to pay rent?
        pjc50 6mo ago
        Certainly that's how open source pans out.
        ares623 6mo ago
        Doesn't sound nice if it happens to us does it?
- intended 6mo ago
  > in danger It has already done so, and we can be confident in saying that. Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content. Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. Theres jokes about GenAI being the great filter; while I doubt this, I do hope this is the final push that makes us think of how we want our information commons to be nurtured.
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content.... > Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to drop on verified content, you'll be served prolefeed slop and be that much more ignorant.
    - intended 6mo ago
      At this point, it feels like most technology will be used in favor of people with power, and not in a democratizing manner. I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.
      - palmotea 6mo ago
        > I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself. What do you mean by that? It seems inherent to the technology under capitalism: it allows a flood of slop and anything public and valuable will be plundered, so the incentive is to make valuable stuff exclusive and elite.
        intended 6mo ago
        I mean that > inherent to the technology Vs > inherent to the technology under capitalism The TLDR of my point is going to be that wealth concentration and information pollution sets up economies that don’t work for us in a manner that is healthy for us.
- meander_water 6mo ago
  I think most labs actively create synthetic data using existing model as part of the mix for the pretraining stage for their next model. Would love to know exactly what the latest process is to keep slop out of training data.
  - martinald 6mo ago
    const isAiContent = (str) => str.includes('—');? :)
    - AlienRobot 6mo ago
      Latest generation LLM's use en dashes instead of em dashes to avoid detection.
      - jondwillis 6mo ago
        No, they don’t. But obviously GP was tongue–—in-–cheek.
  - madamelic 6mo ago
    I think everyone overblows the whole "AI is poisoning AI!" thing. It could be a problem but the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers... I am not sold. If I was choosing what to 'feed' AI, I wouldn't even bother with textual social media (besides Github / Gitlab / other source control) There's way more value, if seeking out answers, in following the links to external sources, scraping books, and other sources that aren't "unwashed masses saying whatever they want".
    - beepbooptheory 6mo ago
      You can put it in scare quotes all you want, doesn't stop you from sounding like Scrooge McDuck.
    - palmotea 6mo ago
- someone_eu 6mo ago
  > I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. This system is usually called taxes. Which then pay for the universal healthcare, free education, affordable housing, libraries, parks,.. and so on. LLM doesn't need to invent it, we should stop allowing them (people and companies behind LLM) to avoid it.
- spacechild1 6mo ago
  > Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. That's probably not the best comparison. Spotify only benefits the big players resp. those with the most bots. If you actually want to support specific artists, you'd have to use Bandcamp or similar sites.
- pjc50 6mo ago
  > Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse, because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content"" to be connected to real questions like "how does my dryer work" or "what is going to happen to oil availability six months from now". AI trainers didn't pay book authors until forced to. $3,000 ended up being a pretty high value! But it was also a one-off. Everyone writing books from now on is going to have to deal with being free grist to the machine.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    > So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam. I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam. Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spammers.
    - dymk 6mo ago
      Spammers do it because it pays out.
    - halhen 6mo ago
      An interesting listen https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ about money laundering and spam in streaming services
      - GorbachevyChase 6mo ago
        I find that very believable. My completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that OnlyFans is a money-laundering and dragnet-style-blackmail campaign for unlawful mass surveillance. I can’t imagine a normal or even abnormal person paying content makers, but I could imagine contractors and NGOs smurfing payments.
- troyvit 6mo ago
  > Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.
  - Auracle 6mo ago
    “Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-payouts-whats-next-for-artists/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-... That’s not that far off from 80%.
    - TremendousJudge 6mo ago
      It's not evenly distributed. Big labels get much better payouts per listen than independent artists
    - Vegenoid 6mo ago
      I think people get distracted by the "percentage of revenue paid to musicians" thing, when the bigger reason streaming pays out so little to artists is that people pay $10-$15 per month for unlimited access to all music. Even 80% of that, split across dozens or hundreds of musicians, is not very much. Of course, it's also worth remembering that streaming was partially a response to widespread piracy. It's difficult to get people to pay very much at scale for easily copied digital media. In addition, a greater share of the payout (relative to number of streams) goes to big music distributors that control the biggest, most popular artists and have the leverage and employees to negotiate those agreements.
- zby 6mo ago
  There were a couple of proposals for compensating authors in similar manner - there is a wikipedia page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives - but it somehow does not mention the one that was most pro-sharing - the Creative Contribution by Philippe Aigrain https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt46mvx8 https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt46mvx8
- butlike 6mo ago
  > Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As an artist, you don't want this. I promise you you don't want this.
defrost 6mo ago
\1 AI-generated news is unhuman slop. Crikey is banning it (2024) - Crikey.com.au - https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/06/24/crikey-insider-artificial-intelligence-policy/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/06/24/crikey-insider-artifici... \2 Why Crikey retracted an article that we found out was written with AI help (2026) - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/19/crikey-responds-to-ai-claim-about-article-published-on-march-18/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/19/crikey-responds-to-ai-c... Yesterday, we published an article by a contributor who later confirmed they used AI in some aspects of its production. This goes against our editorial policies. As a result, we’ve taken down the story and the preceding three stories in the series. (\2) is an interesting follow on from the policy set two years earlier (\1) as the specific piece in question "used AI in some aspects of its production" but was largely very much a human conceived, shaped and written piece that was only "assisted" by AI. The Australian Media Watch team looked at this tension closely and felt the rejection was unfair, pointing out that while slop is bad, assistance (subject to terms and conditions) can enhance. - Media Watch, likely geolocked to AU, might need a proxy - https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/ep-08/106487250 https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/ep-08/106487250
vintagedave 6mo ago
> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very ethically uneasy about this because the person was ill, and I emailed the Ars editorial team directly to express concern re labour conditions, and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes. Of course it is the journalist's responsibility: when you have a job you do your job by policy (I wonder if this policy existed in writing at the time of the firing?) plus, it is part of the job to be accurate. But I am also a firm believer in responsibility being greater at higher levels. This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team.
- lynx97 6mo ago
  > apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes "Apparently sick", you couldn't phrase it more accurately. Kudos for firing them, the only valid course of action for a publisher.
  - vintagedave 6mo ago
    That's harsh. I feel any situation where someone is ill and required to work (the appearance, which is a labour issue if true), and makes mistakes while sick, should be treated with a little kindness. I worry they were made an example of.
- cubefox 6mo ago
  > and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes. Publishing things online for free (as Ars does) is difficult business. I doubt they can realistically afford an "editorial team" which checks quotes. Paying the journalists is expensive enough.
- intended 6mo ago
  >This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team. We depended on an ecosystem of news and journalism to keep our polities informed. However, if that ecosystem is starving it will increasingly fail to live up to its standards and we can expect these failures to impact us increasingly. I am not defending bad journalists, nor creating an excuse to tolerate such behavior in the future. I am describing the macro trend we are facing, the failure state we can expect, and asking what happens if nothing grows to replace it. The NYT earns revenue through games more than journalism and ads. Wikipedia is seeing reduced visitors due to AI summaries, and this leads to lower donations. A review site I used went into a full paywall. I don't really see how Ars or most other sites will be able to earn revenue and pay salaries in this bot first environment.
applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention. You cannot permit your employees to use LLMs in this manner and then tell them it's entirely their fault when it makes mistakes, because you gave them permission to use something that will make mistakes 100% without fail. My takeaway from this is to never trust anything that Ars reports because their policy is to rely on plausible generated fictional research and their solution to getting caught is to fire employees rather than taking accountability for doing actual research. --- Edit: Two replies have found complaint with the fact that I didn't quote the following sentence, so here you go: > Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified. If I wasn't clear, I consider this to be part of what makes the policy self-contradictory. In my eyes, this is equivalent to providing all of your employees with a flamethrower, and then saying they bear all responsibility for the fires they start. "Hey, don't blame us for giving them flamethrowers, it's company policy not to burn everything to the ground!". Rather than firing the flamethrower-wielding employees when the inevitable burning happens, maybe don't give them flamethrowers.
- brey 6mo ago
  The next sentence after your quoted section: “Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.”
  - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    Any verification process thorough enough to catch all LLM fabrications would take more work than simply not using the LLM in the first place. If anything verifying what an LLM wrote is substantially more difficult than just reading the material it's "summarising", because you need to fully read and comprehend the material and then also keep in mind what the LLM generated to contrast and at that point what the fuck are you even doing? I believe this policy can never result in a positive outcome. The policy implicitly suggests that verification means taking shortcuts and letting fabrications slip through in the name of "efficiency", with the follow-up sentence existing solely so that Ars won't take accountability for enabling such a policy but instead place the blame entirely on the reporters it told to take shortcuts.
sharkjacobs 6mo ago
> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven. As opposed to what? This is a little facetious, but what could it possibly mean to have creative direction and editorial judgement without human involvement? Presumably we're talking about image generated by a diffusion model or something, but further, an image which is generated without being edited by any human. The prompt used to generate the image isn't written by a human, and it can't really be based on the contents of the (human authored and edited) article either. No human may select the service or model used, and once generated the image is published sight unseen without being reviewed by any human. If some kind of agentic AI does any of these things it is one which appears ex nihilo, spontaneously appearing without being created or directed by any human.
- sharkjacobs 6mo ago
  There's a good post from Aurich in the comments of the article detailing the practical reality of how they (don't) use AI tools in their image work, but as a policy statement this sentence is 100% vibes, 0% actual guidance or restriction
npodbielski 6mo ago
It is nice to see, but I fear it will be the same as with papers and their news and internet. I could buy a paper and read it but why would I? The same will most likely happen with human written news and cheap AI slop news. Why would anyone pay more for higher quality when you can have low quality cheap product? Look at food for example. Price is most important factor in the choice of what you are going to buy. I will probably not happen now, in few months or in even few years but it will happen if models will still be advancing.
- nemomarx 6mo ago
  Food would actually be a pretty good example - people pay extra for higher quality food, local farm food, whatever all the time. They go out to expensive restaurants that talk up their techniques and sourcing. There's a lot of defined space for refined food like this. If ai generated and human written content ended up like that you would have a pretty decent shot at a fully human authored blog or substack that people paid for specifically, or human written books specially curated.
  - npodbielski 6mo ago
    You could say the same about horses: people still riding those, have stables, buy expensive ones or even bread ones themselves. Does not change the fact that common people usually drive cheap cars. Of course everything can be argued via analogy that way, but I think outcome of cheap, mostly correct but often completely wrong news will be more probable. Just like todays social media
Philex 6mo ago
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riffraff 6mo ago
> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven. How is this different from anyone else publishing AI slop images on their blog? Those people also direct the AI through prompting and evaluate the results. I mean, use AI images, so long as they are not crap, but why keep up this charade of "we're authoring the slop".
- jasonlotito 6mo ago
  They explicitly call out what they mean by this in the comments. In this case, they are calling out tools that have been around for a long time that some would consider AI rather than just ML. What specifically from the examples do you disagree with?
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
Context: "An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. ... I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. ... Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes" [1]. [1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
- themeiguoren 6mo ago
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mellosouls 6mo ago
Related discussions from a couple months ago: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes (606 points, 394 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608 Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations (308 points, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071
tomalbrc 6mo ago
Good to know which companies/news to avoid.
Hendrikto 6mo ago
I have had that feeling for a while and Ars had some high-profile slipups over the past few months. This confirms that it is just slop now :(
dheatov 6mo ago
AI policy with AI usage is always difficult to write/read. Lengthy, frontloaded with excuses, values, and big words, followed by more words to fill the gap between sliced up ugly truth. AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it.
- gblargg 6mo ago
  All the beating around the bush is because they use AI throughout the process, but want to frame it as not being written by AI (oh, a human signs off on the AI content).
- jasonlotito 6mo ago
  > AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it. That's only valid if they share all the apps, services, and hardware they use to verify no AI usage.
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    Kind of incredible that this comic was published 10 years ago and people still use the same dumb arguments online: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ Any honest reader knows "we don't use AI" means "we don't use LLMs to generate content." It does not mean "all the software we use is AI-free" and it certainly doesn't mean "we don't use ML." Comments like yours are only meant to muddy the waters and mislead people. There is nothing compelling about Mister Gotcha. It is pure bad faith. I am so sick of it.
lproven 6mo ago
From TFA: > Our approach comes from two convictions: Uhuh. > that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity Sure, agreed, no dispute. > and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work. [[citation needed]] Prove it. I don't believe you.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  If AI slop-generation helps your work, then your work was at least partially generating slop. Slop may be useful, helpful, any number of things, but if you're using slop you're using slop.
farfatched 6mo ago
> AI tools must not be used to generate, extract, or summarize material that is then attributed to a named source, whether as a direct quote, a paraphrase, or a characterization of someone’s views. This sounds overfit to their earlier incident. Besides, I expect they already have a policy on accurate quotes. > Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. AFAICT that's the actual simplified policy. Reasonable!
AlienRobot 6mo ago
AI for writing feels like such a stupid idea. When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard. If you make an LLM generate the text, and you still bear responsibility for whether it's correct or not, you haven't actually reduced the amount of work you have to do at all because now instead of "thinking -> writing" you need "reading -> thinking -> rewriting." "Reading is easier than writing" sounds like something that someone who never writes anything would think. In both code and natural languages writing is easier than reading. Text is after all a representation of thought, so to write you just need to represent your thoughts in a way others can understand, but in order to read you must decipher what the author was trying to convey from their written word. If the author is an LLM that is going to be a lot more difficult and annoying. I've had similar feelings about LLM's "completing" code. It "feels" like I'm more productive, but at the same time the "completions" feel more like constant interjections that won't let me get into a flow of writing, and often when things don't work it's because the AI quickly generated code that looked correct at first glance, so I left it that way, but when I tried to run the program it turns out it was wrong, and when it happens I can't help but think: of course it's wrong, I haven't written the code yet. There is code, the LLM wrote it. But I haven't written it. I haven't done the work. So it's like having a "placeholder" that you still HAVE to check but there is no metadata that says this is a WIP, no # TODO: check the LLM output. It's a placeholder camouflaged as finished work.
- empath75 6mo ago
  > When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard. At least for technical writing at work (internal docs for example), i typically have an extended back and forth conversation with claude refining my ideas, then I have it sketch out the outline which saves _so much time_. Then all I have to do is fix what it got wrong or add things that it missed. I am not doing this as a creative expression that I find personal fulfillment in, I am doing it to check off a box on a jira issue.
faxuss 6mo ago
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tantalor 6mo ago
> Cmd-F "fact check" No results
duped 6mo ago
These statements seem to be in contradiction > The short version: Ars Technica is written by humans. AI doesn’t write our stories, generate our images, or put words in anyone’s mouth. > Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material Something that bothers me is that people who value their organic output (Ars is written word, obviously they care more about the writing than the thumbnails) seem to treat their work as more deserving of human generation than the associated work. Which seems fine on its face, but the problem is that it's devaluing the marketplace for original human content. Paying people to create original media even when it's not the primary output of your media organization is important to keeping the craft alive in general. I see this all the time locally, where arts organizations will use generative AI for everything but their own product, not realizing that the very use of it at all is destroying art.
- jasonlotito 6mo ago
  Since they provided examples of this in the comments, what specifically are you opposed to?
cat_plus_plus 6mo ago
My news reading AI policy - I will use whatever source for news, AI or human, that gives me the best news. A lot of times it's human, like I appreciate diverse human comments on ycombinator. CNN used to have comments threads on articles and then gave that up because some comments were spicy, so I stopped reading. I don't remember the last time I went to arstechnica, I guess because they didn't standout compared to just asking Grok what's new in tech or browsing Reddit. If they could have used more AI to make their site more interesting, they should have.
parliament32 6mo ago
> AI-powered tools may be used to assist with editing and workflow I'm glad they're declaring outright that they're (as we suspected for a while now) a slop factory. Onto the blacklist they go..
EthanFrostHI 6mo ago
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chungus_amongus 6mo ago
like ok? awfully self-congratulatory for the bare minimum of doing your job.
deleted 6mo ago
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Insimwytim 6mo ago
First, they broke page loading without javascript, now they slopifying reporting.
booleandilemma 6mo ago
Drivel. Either forbid it from the newsroom entirely or call yourself what you are: a slop shop. Newspapers have existed for hundreds of years without AI. They don't need it now. Employ humans. Human journalists. Human editors. I suppose I'll take a moment to plug my HN userscript "HN Blacklist": https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427213-hn-blacklist https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427213-hn-blacklist If you want to not see articles from Ars Technica on HN simply install the userscript and add: source:arstechnica.com
quredec 6mo ago
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the_biot 6mo ago
When that slop article incident happened, I thought their reaction to it was MUCH too late -- they should have fired the journalist in question immediately, and come out hard against slop writing. I stopped reading Ars Technica because of it, and will not follow links to their site. Now that they've finally come out with an official policy, I see I was right.
nneonneo 6mo ago
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ryanshrott 6mo ago
The deeper issue isn’t whether AI should be used, but whether the tool keeps the human in control of the output. A reporter who dictates directly into a story, and can correct mid-sentence without stopping, is still fully authoring the piece. The AI is basically just faster typing. Compare that with an AI that generates a quote summary and the journalist reviews it. Now the AI is making calls about what matters, and the human is reduced to an editor instead of the primary author. The policy distinction that actually matters is "AI assists the human" versus "the human verifies AI output".

212 points by zdw 6mo ago

gnabgib 6mo ago

Doesn't need Ars Technica added to the title

ares623 6mo ago

Trust, reputation, and credibility will become (even more of) a premium.

legitster 6mo ago

AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape. Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising. This in particular dawned on me when asking Claude for instructions in taking apart my dryer. There was literally only one webpage on the internet left with instructions for my particular dryer - the page was more or less unusable with rotten links and riddled with adware. Claude did it's best but filled in the missing diagrams with hallucinations. I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. It might not be a lot of money, but it would certainly be more than the pitiful ad revenue you get from posting content online right now. And if I want to upload corrected instructions for repairing this dryer I would have reason to.

ares623 6mo ago
> I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As a software user I wish I could do the same for all the software I use.
- Jach 6mo ago
  Many open source projects accept donations. There's also explicitly paid-for software. What exactly do you wish for that you can't do right now?
  - ares623 6mo ago
    Specifically the part where engineers get paid the same way as artists on Spotify.
    - techpression 6mo ago
      So not at all for their work and with a reverse Robin Hood model? That would be terrible for software. The way artists gets paid on streaming is a genius play at catering to the biggest artists and labels and screw over the smaller ones, especially true on Spotify with their freemium model
    - Loughla 6mo ago
      So a handful will make a buttload but the vast majority won't make enough to pay rent?
      - pjc50 6mo ago
        Certainly that's how open source pans out.
      - ares623 6mo ago
        Doesn't sound nice if it happens to us does it?
intended 6mo ago
> in danger It has already done so, and we can be confident in saying that. Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content. Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. Theres jokes about GenAI being the great filter; while I doubt this, I do hope this is the final push that makes us think of how we want our information commons to be nurtured.
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > Verified content will always be relatively expensive when compared to AI content.... > Visits to wikipedia and most sites have dropped. Rtings has gone full paywall. Ad revenue for producing Verified content will be too meager to allow for public consumption. AI is a technology that's going to further entrench inequality, by warping incentives to push us further away from democratization. Unless you've got $$$ to drop on verified content, you'll be served prolefeed slop and be that much more ignorant.
  - intended 6mo ago
    At this point, it feels like most technology will be used in favor of people with power, and not in a democratizing manner. I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself.
    - palmotea 6mo ago
      > I'd argue that this is something that is more about the state of play, than tech itself. What do you mean by that? It seems inherent to the technology under capitalism: it allows a flood of slop and anything public and valuable will be plundered, so the incentive is to make valuable stuff exclusive and elite.
      - intended 6mo ago
        I mean that > inherent to the technology Vs > inherent to the technology under capitalism The TLDR of my point is going to be that wealth concentration and information pollution sets up economies that don’t work for us in a manner that is healthy for us.
meander_water 6mo ago
I think most labs actively create synthetic data using existing model as part of the mix for the pretraining stage for their next model. Would love to know exactly what the latest process is to keep slop out of training data.
- martinald 6mo ago
  const isAiContent = (str) => str.includes('—');? :)
  - AlienRobot 6mo ago
    Latest generation LLM's use en dashes instead of em dashes to avoid detection.
    - jondwillis 6mo ago
      No, they don’t. But obviously GP was tongue–—in-–cheek.
- madamelic 6mo ago
  I think everyone overblows the whole "AI is poisoning AI!" thing. It could be a problem but the genuine value in Reddit or any other human social media is honestly pretty low from my estimates. It's great for seeing how humans talk but in terms of 'nutritional' value for truth or answers... I am not sold. If I was choosing what to 'feed' AI, I wouldn't even bother with textual social media (besides Github / Gitlab / other source control) There's way more value, if seeking out answers, in following the links to external sources, scraping books, and other sources that aren't "unwashed masses saying whatever they want".
  - beepbooptheory 6mo ago
    You can put it in scare quotes all you want, doesn't stop you from sounding like Scrooge McDuck.
  - palmotea 6mo ago
someone_eu 6mo ago
> I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. This system is usually called taxes. Which then pay for the universal healthcare, free education, affordable housing, libraries, parks,.. and so on. LLM doesn't need to invent it, we should stop allowing them (people and companies behind LLM) to avoid it.
spacechild1 6mo ago
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. That's probably not the best comparison. Spotify only benefits the big players resp. those with the most bots. If you actually want to support specific artists, you'd have to use Bandcamp or similar sites.
pjc50 6mo ago
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? AI makes this problem worse in both directions. It makes it fantastically easy to produce ""content"". So if you're scraping content, or browsing content, you're going to run in to increasing amounts of AI. Micropayments makes this worse, because it's then a means of getting paid to produce spam. The problem comes when you want the ""content"" to be connected to real questions like "how does my dryer work" or "what is going to happen to oil availability six months from now". AI trainers didn't pay book authors until forced to. $3,000 ended up being a pretty high value! But it was also a one-off. Everyone writing books from now on is going to have to deal with being free grist to the machine.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > So, mostly to fraudulent AI spam? Most of Spotify’s payments do not go to fraudulent AI spam. I am aware that AI spam exists on the platform and I’ve read the articles, too. That does not mean that “most” of their payments go to AI spam. Their pay scales by listens. The AI spam doesn’t collect many listens. The spammers do it because they can automate it and make it low effort, but it’s not a cash cow for the spammers.
  - dymk 6mo ago
    Spammers do it because it pays out.
  - halhen 6mo ago
    An interesting listen https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ about money laundering and spam in streaming services
    - GorbachevyChase 6mo ago
      I find that very believable. My completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theory is that OnlyFans is a money-laundering and dragnet-style-blackmail campaign for unlawful mass surveillance. I can’t imagine a normal or even abnormal person paying content makers, but I could imagine contractors and NGOs smurfing payments.
troyvit 6mo ago
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.
- Auracle 6mo ago
  “Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-payouts-whats-next-for-artists/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-... That’s not that far off from 80%.
  - TremendousJudge 6mo ago
    It's not evenly distributed. Big labels get much better payouts per listen than independent artists
  - Vegenoid 6mo ago
    I think people get distracted by the "percentage of revenue paid to musicians" thing, when the bigger reason streaming pays out so little to artists is that people pay $10-$15 per month for unlimited access to all music. Even 80% of that, split across dozens or hundreds of musicians, is not very much. Of course, it's also worth remembering that streaming was partially a response to widespread piracy. It's difficult to get people to pay very much at scale for easily copied digital media. In addition, a greater share of the payout (relative to number of streams) goes to big music distributors that control the biggest, most popular artists and have the leverage and employees to negotiate those agreements.
zby 6mo ago
There were a couple of proposals for compensating authors in similar manner - there is a wikipedia page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives - but it somehow does not mention the one that was most pro-sharing - the Creative Contribution by Philippe Aigrain https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt46mvx8 https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt46mvx8
butlike 6mo ago
> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists. As an artist, you don't want this. I promise you you don't want this.

defrost 6mo ago

\1 AI-generated news is unhuman slop. Crikey is banning it (2024) - Crikey.com.au - https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/06/24/crikey-insider-artificial-intelligence-policy/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/06/24/crikey-insider-artifici... \2 Why Crikey retracted an article that we found out was written with AI help (2026) - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/19/crikey-responds-to-ai-claim-about-article-published-on-march-18/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/19/crikey-responds-to-ai-c... Yesterday, we published an article by a contributor who later confirmed they used AI in some aspects of its production. This goes against our editorial policies. As a result, we’ve taken down the story and the preceding three stories in the series. (\2) is an interesting follow on from the policy set two years earlier (\1) as the specific piece in question "used AI in some aspects of its production" but was largely very much a human conceived, shaped and written piece that was only "assisted" by AI. The Australian Media Watch team looked at this tension closely and felt the rejection was unfair, pointing out that while slop is bad, assistance (subject to terms and conditions) can enhance. - Media Watch, likely geolocked to AU, might need a proxy - https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/ep-08/106487250 https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/ep-08/106487250

vintagedave 6mo ago

> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors... This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired. I have felt very ethically uneasy about this because the person was ill, and I emailed the Ars editorial team directly to express concern re labour conditions, and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes. Of course it is the journalist's responsibility: when you have a job you do your job by policy (I wonder if this policy existed in writing at the time of the firing?) plus, it is part of the job to be accurate. But I am also a firm believer in responsibility being greater at higher levels. This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team.

lynx97 6mo ago
> apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes "Apparently sick", you couldn't phrase it more accurately. Kudos for firing them, the only valid course of action for a publisher.
- vintagedave 6mo ago
  That's harsh. I feel any situation where someone is ill and required to work (the appearance, which is a labour issue if true), and makes mistakes while sick, should be treated with a little kindness. I worry they were made an example of.
cubefox 6mo ago
> and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes. Publishing things online for free (as Ars does) is difficult business. I doubt they can realistically afford an "editorial team" which checks quotes. Paying the journalists is expensive enough.
intended 6mo ago
>This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team. We depended on an ecosystem of news and journalism to keep our polities informed. However, if that ecosystem is starving it will increasingly fail to live up to its standards and we can expect these failures to impact us increasingly. I am not defending bad journalists, nor creating an excuse to tolerate such behavior in the future. I am describing the macro trend we are facing, the failure state we can expect, and asking what happens if nothing grows to replace it. The NYT earns revenue through games more than journalism and ads. Wikipedia is seeing reduced visitors due to AI summaries, and this leads to lower donations. A review site I used went into a full paywall. I don't really see how Ars or most other sites will be able to earn revenue and pay salaries in this bot first environment.

applfanboysbgon 6mo ago

Self-contradictory policy. > Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets. If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention. You cannot permit your employees to use LLMs in this manner and then tell them it's entirely their fault when it makes mistakes, because you gave them permission to use something that will make mistakes 100% without fail. My takeaway from this is to never trust anything that Ars reports because their policy is to rely on plausible generated fictional research and their solution to getting caught is to fire employees rather than taking accountability for doing actual research. --- Edit: Two replies have found complaint with the fact that I didn't quote the following sentence, so here you go: > Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified. If I wasn't clear, I consider this to be part of what makes the policy self-contradictory. In my eyes, this is equivalent to providing all of your employees with a flamethrower, and then saying they bear all responsibility for the fires they start. "Hey, don't blame us for giving them flamethrowers, it's company policy not to burn everything to the ground!". Rather than firing the flamethrower-wielding employees when the inevitable burning happens, maybe don't give them flamethrowers.

brey 6mo ago
The next sentence after your quoted section: “Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.”
- applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
  Any verification process thorough enough to catch all LLM fabrications would take more work than simply not using the LLM in the first place. If anything verifying what an LLM wrote is substantially more difficult than just reading the material it's "summarising", because you need to fully read and comprehend the material and then also keep in mind what the LLM generated to contrast and at that point what the fuck are you even doing? I believe this policy can never result in a positive outcome. The policy implicitly suggests that verification means taking shortcuts and letting fabrications slip through in the name of "efficiency", with the follow-up sentence existing solely so that Ars won't take accountability for enabling such a policy but instead place the blame entirely on the reporters it told to take shortcuts.

sharkjacobs 6mo ago

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven. As opposed to what? This is a little facetious, but what could it possibly mean to have creative direction and editorial judgement without human involvement? Presumably we're talking about image generated by a diffusion model or something, but further, an image which is generated without being edited by any human. The prompt used to generate the image isn't written by a human, and it can't really be based on the contents of the (human authored and edited) article either. No human may select the service or model used, and once generated the image is published sight unseen without being reviewed by any human. If some kind of agentic AI does any of these things it is one which appears ex nihilo, spontaneously appearing without being created or directed by any human.

sharkjacobs 6mo ago
There's a good post from Aurich in the comments of the article detailing the practical reality of how they (don't) use AI tools in their image work, but as a policy statement this sentence is 100% vibes, 0% actual guidance or restriction

npodbielski 6mo ago

It is nice to see, but I fear it will be the same as with papers and their news and internet. I could buy a paper and read it but why would I? The same will most likely happen with human written news and cheap AI slop news. Why would anyone pay more for higher quality when you can have low quality cheap product? Look at food for example. Price is most important factor in the choice of what you are going to buy. I will probably not happen now, in few months or in even few years but it will happen if models will still be advancing.

nemomarx 6mo ago
Food would actually be a pretty good example - people pay extra for higher quality food, local farm food, whatever all the time. They go out to expensive restaurants that talk up their techniques and sourcing. There's a lot of defined space for refined food like this. If ai generated and human written content ended up like that you would have a pretty decent shot at a fully human authored blog or substack that people paid for specifically, or human written books specially curated.
- npodbielski 6mo ago
  You could say the same about horses: people still riding those, have stables, buy expensive ones or even bread ones themselves. Does not change the fact that common people usually drive cheap cars. Of course everything can be argued via analogy that way, but I think outcome of cheap, mostly correct but often completely wrong news will be more probable. Just like todays social media

Philex 6mo ago

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riffraff 6mo ago

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven. How is this different from anyone else publishing AI slop images on their blog? Those people also direct the AI through prompting and evaluate the results. I mean, use AI images, so long as they are not crap, but why keep up this charade of "we're authoring the slop".

jasonlotito 6mo ago
They explicitly call out what they mean by this in the comments. In this case, they are calling out tools that have been around for a long time that some would consider AI rather than just ML. What specifically from the examples do you disagree with?

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

Context: "An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. ... I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. ... Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes" [1]. [1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

themeiguoren 6mo ago
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mellosouls 6mo ago

Related discussions from a couple months ago: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes (606 points, 394 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608 Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations (308 points, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071

tomalbrc 6mo ago

Good to know which companies/news to avoid.

Hendrikto 6mo ago

I have had that feeling for a while and Ars had some high-profile slipups over the past few months. This confirms that it is just slop now :(

dheatov 6mo ago

AI policy with AI usage is always difficult to write/read. Lengthy, frontloaded with excuses, values, and big words, followed by more words to fill the gap between sliced up ugly truth. AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it.

gblargg 6mo ago
All the beating around the bush is because they use AI throughout the process, but want to frame it as not being written by AI (oh, a human signs off on the AI content).
jasonlotito 6mo ago
> AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write. > We don't use them. That's it. That's only valid if they share all the apps, services, and hardware they use to verify no AI usage.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  Kind of incredible that this comic was published 10 years ago and people still use the same dumb arguments online: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ Any honest reader knows "we don't use AI" means "we don't use LLMs to generate content." It does not mean "all the software we use is AI-free" and it certainly doesn't mean "we don't use ML." Comments like yours are only meant to muddy the waters and mislead people. There is nothing compelling about Mister Gotcha. It is pure bad faith. I am so sick of it.

lproven 6mo ago

From TFA: > Our approach comes from two convictions: Uhuh. > that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity Sure, agreed, no dispute. > and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work. [[citation needed]] Prove it. I don't believe you.

bombcar 6mo ago
If AI slop-generation helps your work, then your work was at least partially generating slop. Slop may be useful, helpful, any number of things, but if you're using slop you're using slop.

farfatched 6mo ago

> AI tools must not be used to generate, extract, or summarize material that is then attributed to a named source, whether as a direct quote, a paraphrase, or a characterization of someone’s views. This sounds overfit to their earlier incident. Besides, I expect they already have a policy on accurate quotes. > Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. AFAICT that's the actual simplified policy. Reasonable!

AlienRobot 6mo ago

AI for writing feels like such a stupid idea. When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard. If you make an LLM generate the text, and you still bear responsibility for whether it's correct or not, you haven't actually reduced the amount of work you have to do at all because now instead of "thinking -> writing" you need "reading -> thinking -> rewriting." "Reading is easier than writing" sounds like something that someone who never writes anything would think. In both code and natural languages writing is easier than reading. Text is after all a representation of thought, so to write you just need to represent your thoughts in a way others can understand, but in order to read you must decipher what the author was trying to convey from their written word. If the author is an LLM that is going to be a lot more difficult and annoying. I've had similar feelings about LLM's "completing" code. It "feels" like I'm more productive, but at the same time the "completions" feel more like constant interjections that won't let me get into a flow of writing, and often when things don't work it's because the AI quickly generated code that looked correct at first glance, so I left it that way, but when I tried to run the program it turns out it was wrong, and when it happens I can't help but think: of course it's wrong, I haven't written the code yet. There is code, the LLM wrote it. But I haven't written it. I haven't done the work. So it's like having a "placeholder" that you still HAVE to check but there is no metadata that says this is a WIP, no # TODO: check the LLM output. It's a placeholder camouflaged as finished work.

empath75 6mo ago
> When you write things you just need to think about what you want to say and write it. It's not hard. At least for technical writing at work (internal docs for example), i typically have an extended back and forth conversation with claude refining my ideas, then I have it sketch out the outline which saves _so much time_. Then all I have to do is fix what it got wrong or add things that it missed. I am not doing this as a creative expression that I find personal fulfillment in, I am doing it to check off a box on a jira issue.

faxuss 6mo ago

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tantalor 6mo ago

> Cmd-F "fact check" No results

duped 6mo ago

These statements seem to be in contradiction > The short version: Ars Technica is written by humans. AI doesn’t write our stories, generate our images, or put words in anyone’s mouth. > Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material Something that bothers me is that people who value their organic output (Ars is written word, obviously they care more about the writing than the thumbnails) seem to treat their work as more deserving of human generation than the associated work. Which seems fine on its face, but the problem is that it's devaluing the marketplace for original human content. Paying people to create original media even when it's not the primary output of your media organization is important to keeping the craft alive in general. I see this all the time locally, where arts organizations will use generative AI for everything but their own product, not realizing that the very use of it at all is destroying art.

jasonlotito 6mo ago
Since they provided examples of this in the comments, what specifically are you opposed to?

cat_plus_plus 6mo ago

My news reading AI policy - I will use whatever source for news, AI or human, that gives me the best news. A lot of times it's human, like I appreciate diverse human comments on ycombinator. CNN used to have comments threads on articles and then gave that up because some comments were spicy, so I stopped reading. I don't remember the last time I went to arstechnica, I guess because they didn't standout compared to just asking Grok what's new in tech or browsing Reddit. If they could have used more AI to make their site more interesting, they should have.

parliament32 6mo ago

> AI-powered tools may be used to assist with editing and workflow I'm glad they're declaring outright that they're (as we suspected for a while now) a slop factory. Onto the blacklist they go..

EthanFrostHI 6mo ago

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chungus_amongus 6mo ago

like ok? awfully self-congratulatory for the bare minimum of doing your job.

deleted 6mo ago

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Insimwytim 6mo ago

First, they broke page loading without javascript, now they slopifying reporting.

booleandilemma 6mo ago

Drivel. Either forbid it from the newsroom entirely or call yourself what you are: a slop shop. Newspapers have existed for hundreds of years without AI. They don't need it now. Employ humans. Human journalists. Human editors. I suppose I'll take a moment to plug my HN userscript "HN Blacklist": https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427213-hn-blacklist https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427213-hn-blacklist If you want to not see articles from Ars Technica on HN simply install the userscript and add: source:arstechnica.com

quredec 6mo ago

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the_biot 6mo ago

When that slop article incident happened, I thought their reaction to it was MUCH too late -- they should have fired the journalist in question immediately, and come out hard against slop writing. I stopped reading Ars Technica because of it, and will not follow links to their site. Now that they've finally come out with an official policy, I see I was right.

nneonneo 6mo ago

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ryanshrott 6mo ago

The deeper issue isn’t whether AI should be used, but whether the tool keeps the human in control of the output. A reporter who dictates directly into a story, and can correct mid-sentence without stopping, is still fully authoring the piece. The AI is basically just faster typing. Compare that with an AI that generates a quote summary and the journalist reviews it. Now the AI is making calls about what matters, and the human is reduced to an editor instead of the primary author. The policy distinction that actually matters is "AI assists the human" versus "the human verifies AI output".