A story about an AI generated article contained fabricated, AI generated quotes.
  • terminatortwo@piefed.socialEnglish
    323·
    16 days ago

    What a shame. I’ve subscribed to ars for years. Their response was disappointing, it doesn’t talk about what happened and what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

    Nothing about how they handled them makes me trust that they won’t do it again.

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      16 days ago

      I think their response is perfectly reasonable. They took the article down and replaced it with an explanation of why, and posted an extremely visible retraction with open comments on their front page. They even reached out and apologized to the person who had the made-up quote attributed to them.

      There are so many other outlets that would have just quietly taken the original article down without notice, or perhaps even just left it up.

      • TheOneCurly@feddit.onlineEnglish
        10·
        16 days ago

        But like what am I supposed to do when senior ai reporter Benj writes his next piece? Ars works because the writers are generally experienced in the topics and do analysis and provide insight. Do we just accept that chatgpt is the new head ai writer with a meat puppet? They need to address the trust issue before this is resolved.

        • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          16 days ago

          Their retraction article makes it crystal clear that their reporters are not allowed to use AI output in articles at all, unless it’s explicitly for demonstration purposes. That rule was broken. They took appropriate action, apologized, and made a commitment to do better.

          I, frankly, believe them - ars is the news outlet I’ve frequented longer than any other for a reason. I understand if it’s going to take more for you to believe them, but it’s just one mistake. It’s also not clear to me what they could have done in this situation that would have felt like enough to you? Were you hoping for a play-by-play of who entered what into ChatGPT, or a firing or something?

          I’m also not sure I’d consider the saga over. It wouldn’t overly surprise me if at some point this week we get a longer article going into more detail about what happened.

    • ooterness@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      16 days ago

      I wouldn’t go that far. The article was posted Friday afternoon, and blew up over the weekend. Once the problem was known, the article was taken down quickly. We’ll see what happens when the editorial staff is back in the office in Monday.

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPMEnglish
      7·
      16 days ago

      Assuming they are not lying about their internal policies (nobody disputed that at the moment), it’s already not allowed and this was writer fuck-up. Benj Edwards “Senior AI Reporter”, co-author of that article took the blame for it.

      The article was also removed after 1 hour and 42 minutes on a Friday. That’s faster than most other publications able to include update note in my experience (when they bother in the first place).

      Apart from punishing this writer for breaking the internal policy I’m not sure what else they can do here to satisfy your concerns.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    17·
    16 days ago

    It sucks that of all articles this happened to, it was to the “AI Agent hit piece” one.
    That was such a ridiculous event and having a good article by a big outlet covering it is important, so now not only was the article inaccurate, all discussions generated went kaput and were overshadowed by this.

    • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      16 days ago

      Because of money. Why pay someone to do actual work when you can get an AI to plagiarise and hallucinate for free?