Ars saw his old explanation and conducted an internal review that took weeks, and found it lacking. His new explanation is… He isn’t giving one, after being asked for comment.
Comment on Ars Technica Fires Reporter Over AI-Generated Quotes
AngryishHumanoid@lemmy.world 20 hours agoYou should read the guy’s explanation. It legitimately seems like an honest mistake, but given his work was specifically geared towards avoiding a situation like that I’m not surprised he was let go.
XLE@piefed.social 12 hours ago
wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
I think he’s more a libality at this point.
Not caring for if something is true ("reckless regard for the truth"), opens up libel lawsuits.
You cant just publish made up quotes on reporting a virtual hit piece on someone’s reputation.
Greddan@feddit.org 20 hours ago
The guy had several explanations rolled into one so it seems more like a dishonest lie than an honest mistake. The guy the article was about had a decent explanation of how it happened though. His blog has AI scraping protections enabled, so when the so called journalist asked an AI to write an article for him citing the blog post, the AI couldn’t access it, and did what AI do, made shit up.
0x0@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
Tell me more.
Greddan@feddit.org 9 hours ago
theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece…
It’s all in here.
XLE@piefed.social 7 hours ago
That’s just one explanation among many. A more reasonable guess is that the Ars writer went to his webpage, then asked an AI extension, which would have total access to an open tabs, to pull out quotes or something similar. LLMs find it hard to not change text, even when instructed to.
There are more egregious examples of the author overestimating AI on the same blog post…
hexagonwin@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
lmao, didn’t know the ‘ai’ tool is that stupid to not handle website blocks/exceptions…
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 17 hours ago
It’s not quite like that. The tools used to scrape the web for training data couldn’t access the site to stacks the data, so it’s not encoded in the model.
The query interface for the model just hallucinates when there’s a ‘vacuum’.
hexagonwin@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
i was thinking of some “automated browser” type, like if the browser returns an error page saying it’s blocked, the LLM would get the "blocked from website"ish error as the page content, and shouldn’t it say something around “I’m sorry, I couldn’t access the website” instead of “Sure! Here’s a summary of that webpage” followed by hallucinated bs. well maybe that’s not the case here?