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Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

danso

Comments (159)

  • AnonC
    Journalists 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.
  • aizk
    I 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.
  • breput
    As 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.
  • geerlingguy
    Context from earlier discussion of the article being pulled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
  • rahimnathwani
    The 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.
  • aidenn0
    I 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.
  • raincole
    I 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.
  • JumpCrisscross
    “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.
  • jmward01
    You 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.
  • lich_king
    I 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?
  • anon
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  • bragr
    The 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.
  • anon
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  • fp64
    Sad 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.
  • 0xbadcafebee
    I 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.
  • sl0pmaestro
    Happy 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.
  • vadansky
    Good time to watch Shattered Glass.Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.
  • gigatexal
    This 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.
  • ModernMech
    I'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.
  • ares623
    If 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
    Really 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.
  • anon
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  • anon
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  • shadowgovt
    That 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.
  • Gagarin1917
    Are 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.
  • Barrin92
    people 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...) 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.
  • protocolture
    >The Condé Nast-owned Ars TechnicaI despise Conde Nast
  • Revanche1367
    So 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.
  • anon
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  • add-sub-mul-div
    > senior AI reporterA true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM output than anyone else.
  • internet2000
    [flagged]
  • aaron695
    [dead]
  • jmyeet
    The 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.
  • sl0pmaestro
    > 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 himOh 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.
  • jackyli02
    The role "reporter" deserves very little credence in AI now. The public might be better off if they get their information on AI from ChatGPT.
  • neya
    [flagged]
  • ab_testing
    So they fired that author after the author had publicly apologized on Blue sky.
  • itvision
    A woke far left anti-AI website fires a jurno who dared to use AI.Check their comments section: tribalism, echo chamber and extreme prejudice - I hope the man will find a new less fanatical company to work for.