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.
“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.
> 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 him
Oh 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.
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.
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.
I'm a journalist. As a general rule, if someone approaches me with a pitch for a feature or investigation (not news piece) that was already published elsewhere, I'll turn it down. To be fair, I turn down all PR pitches, but there are journalists who don't but still want an exclusive.
It sometimes happens that you spend weeks or months working on a story, only to be scooped by another publication. It sucks, especially if you think your story is the better one, but unless you can pivot or add a substantial amount of new insight, it won't come out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes I use a completely meaningless combination of keywords by mistake, and AI Overview will happily make up a story telling me what I am looking for.
> nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good
I felt similarly yesterday. This morning AIMode fabricated for me a diverse science education publishing and research effort around using generative AI to teach rough-quantitative reasoning. My face-nibbling canary was a linked cite to a book "Orders of Magnitude"... a sci-fi horror novella about space marines. Would be nice if the outlined work actually existed. There we some nice ideas. I look forward to it. The education stuff, not the space marines.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This was from a journalist _who_is_hired_as_expert_ at knowing of/about tooling that hallucinates (LLM ((AI)) chatbots). Decides to implicitly trust said technology to write a "hit piece" (lets be honest it was).
In several territories that would fall under slander and if is untrue is a major journalistic mis-step and career ending faux-pas.
Why in any situation would their position now be defendable?
This is akin to being a journalist of iron-mongering writing a "truth" piece on how "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" (if you don't get my reference here, lucky you). It's outright un-professional.
Blaming it on illness allows everyone to save face, but they were compos mentis enough to hit publish at the time. That itself carries a certain "I'm well enough to agree this is a good article" from said author.
I wouldn't characterize the story as a hit piece; the misquotes didn't distort his position. What happened is the LLM accurately summarized his position, but they weren't actually his words in the quotes.
> There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences.
Exactly! The situation happened, no going back, but they had a choice - to be transparent about it and I am sure people would be appreciative of it, maybe giving them net positive rather than negative, but the choice they have made is a complete opposite and a sign that no one should trust them.
Ars did own up to its mistake both in writing and in firing the author. The author himself fell on his sword in detail on Bluesky.
Your only real complaint is that their published explanation wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that means it's sad to see them at this level?
Republishing an article with corrected quotes is reserved for cases where an editorial team can trust the substance of an article. There is an error but that error doesn’t impact the amount of trust the editorial team has in the article.
A retraction is totally different. It means that an editorial team does not trust any of the underlying article. It’s the biggest stick in journalism and is only reserved for the absolute worst breaches of trust.
When you retract an article and then update the author’s bio to past tense, that’s as clear of a signal as you can ethically send. A publication with clout makes news and writes the first line of people’s obituaries while they’re still alive - a degree of tact, professionalism and newsworthiness comes into play.
There's no point trying to update an article with fake sources. If you can't trust the material, there's no story. I think pulling it was the right move here.
This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened.
Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".
I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it, but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people defended this course of non-action by saying it was the sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become witnesses in the trial.
why should ars technica have to publish grovelling apologies to satisfy their readers. it's not a tabloid.
and as it's obviously a HR issue both parties are restricted to what they can say, if they want to provide more details on their personal feeds and people are interested they can find out respectively.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 86.0 ms ] threadA true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM output than anyone else.
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.
Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing fraudulent quotes.
Oh 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.
Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.
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.
It sometimes happens that you spend weeks or months working on a story, only to be scooped by another publication. It sucks, especially if you think your story is the better one, but unless you can pivot or add a substantial amount of new insight, it won't come out.
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.
You don’t need an institutional push to make people take shortcuts.
Many people will take shortcuts to work less if they think they won’t get caught. You don’t even need external pressure.
I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.
Sometimes I use a completely meaningless combination of keywords by mistake, and AI Overview will happily make up a story telling me what I am looking for.
I felt similarly yesterday. This morning AIMode fabricated for me a diverse science education publishing and research effort around using generative AI to teach rough-quantitative reasoning. My face-nibbling canary was a linked cite to a book "Orders of Magnitude"... a sci-fi horror novella about space marines. Would be nice if the outlined work actually existed. There we some nice ideas. I look forward to it. The education stuff, not the space marines.
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.
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?
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.
This was from a journalist _who_is_hired_as_expert_ at knowing of/about tooling that hallucinates (LLM ((AI)) chatbots). Decides to implicitly trust said technology to write a "hit piece" (lets be honest it was).
In several territories that would fall under slander and if is untrue is a major journalistic mis-step and career ending faux-pas.
Why in any situation would their position now be defendable?
This is akin to being a journalist of iron-mongering writing a "truth" piece on how "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" (if you don't get my reference here, lucky you). It's outright un-professional.
Blaming it on illness allows everyone to save face, but they were compos mentis enough to hit publish at the time. That itself carries a certain "I'm well enough to agree this is a good article" from said author.
Exactly! The situation happened, no going back, but they had a choice - to be transparent about it and I am sure people would be appreciative of it, maybe giving them net positive rather than negative, but the choice they have made is a complete opposite and a sign that no one should trust them.
They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity above all.
Ars did own up to its mistake both in writing and in firing the author. The author himself fell on his sword in detail on Bluesky.
Your only real complaint is that their published explanation wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that means it's sad to see them at this level?
A retraction is totally different. It means that an editorial team does not trust any of the underlying article. It’s the biggest stick in journalism and is only reserved for the absolute worst breaches of trust.
When you retract an article and then update the author’s bio to past tense, that’s as clear of a signal as you can ethically send. A publication with clout makes news and writes the first line of people’s obituaries while they’re still alive - a degree of tact, professionalism and newsworthiness comes into play.
This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened.
Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".
and as it's obviously a HR issue both parties are restricted to what they can say, if they want to provide more details on their personal feeds and people are interested they can find out respectively.