Backstory here: https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-fabricated-quotes-about-ai-generated-article/
Personally I think this is a good response. I hope they stay true to it in the future.
Link to the archived version of the article in question.
I actually like the editor’s note. Instead of naming-and-shaming the author (Benj Edwards), it’s blaming “Ars Technica”. It also claims they looked for further issues. It sounds surprisingly sincere for corporate apology.
Blaming AT as a whole is important because it acknowledges Edwards wasn’t the only one fucking it up. Whatever a journalist submits needs to be reviewed by at least a second person, exactly for this reason: to catch up dumb mistakes. Either this system is not in place or not working properly.
I do think Edwards is to blame but I wouldn’t go so far as saying he should be fired, unless he has a backstory of doing this sort of dumb shit. (AFAIK he doesn’t.) “People should be responsible for their tool usage” is not the same as “every infraction deserves capital punishment”; sometimes scolding is enough. I think @totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone’s comment was spot on in this regard: he should’ve taken sick time off, but this would have cost him vacation time, and even being forced to make this choice is a systemic problem. So ultimately it falls on his employer (AT) again.
I agree with you. For better or worse, I have to imagine a lot of people who’s job relies on pumping out regular articles use LLMs to get the ball rolling. Which is what appears to have happened here.
Benj Edwards, the author responsible, has posted his side.
This is a good way to handle the situation and an understandable and believable scenario, so I’m perfectly willing to forgive this. I’m a little less okay with an apparent “work in spite of illness” policy, however.
But still, it’s a serious blunder, and it needs to be said that any repeat of this at all would be very damning. I can’t forgive this level of fuckup twice. Any AI use is a risk, folks; treat it like one.
When I first became aware of it, I did not expect this story to become a good case for worker’s rights and ensuring everyone has enough rest but here we are.
This sounds eerily familiar…
I don’t know if Hearst told him to use a chatbot to generate their “Best of Summer Lists,” but it doesn’t matter. When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.
But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive process). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/
Thanks for sharing, I was wondering if he would say anything about it. They seem to be handling it well.
Woah, they take the blame and apologize. This is not often seen and commands respect.
I don’t see anything new? It’s a response, I was hoping they’d actually say what happened instead of… just repeating that it did.
I read them regularly for years until they started banning folk in the forums for pointing out how problematic it is for Eric Berger to still be slobbering on Elon’s knob.
Don’t think I’m missing much, though I do miss Beth Mole.
It is 23.43, and I can’t analyze this tonight. Ars has been good for a long while, and I enjoy their reporting. To have to reassess this is disappointing, but I’ve already had to feel this with the NYT and WaPo. Not exactly a huge loss here. But I want to fully investigate what happened ahead of reaching a conclusion.
Rest assured, I will reach a conclusion. I don’t think I’ll like the one I think I’ll find, but that’s journalism for you. I will withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to fully examine what happened here.
