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Comment by water-data-dude | Hacker News Reader

Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

[1] your mileage may vary on how much you believe it and how much slack you want to cut him if you do

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The bigger problem is that he felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever.

Makes me wonder about Ars Technica's company culture.

Have you met any professional journos? It's not exactly a laid back profession. I could easily imagine the people I know pushing through illness to get a story out.

tbh that's the least surprising aspect of this. Most journalists do not have work-life balance.

> felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever

You are assuming that...

He says he currently has a fever.

But was he sick when he wrote the article? That is not so clear.

He was, it's in the first paragraph

> I have been sick with COVID all week /../, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.

That's words, not facts.

> That's words, not facts.

Ok, what sort of facts would you accept here?

How do you unintentionally use an AI to help you write an article?

A fever can cause altered mental states, confusion, etc. It's not surprising that someone suffering from one would act out of character.

Yeah, personally with a high fever I’d say I’m more impaired than when I’m drunk. It’s not a state people should be doing anything important in.

Being under stress and being ill at the same time can change your modus operandi. I know, because that happens to me, too.

When I'm too tired, too stupid, and too stressed, I stop after a point. Otherwise things go bad. Being sick adds extra mental fog, so I try to stop sooner.

Being aware of it needs some effort, though.

Read the article. The use of AI was not accidental, but how the output was used was.

Paste the original blog post into ChatGPT asking it to summarize or provide suggestions. Unintentionally copy and paste quotes from the ChatGPT output rather than the original blog post.

I agree that the work culture promoting this is bad, but being sick is still simply not an excuse to fabricate quotes with AI. It's still just journalistic malfeasance, and if Ars actually cares about the quality of their journalism, he should be fired for it.

Should he? Where does that mindset come from? The author has owned up to his mistake. Unless there is a pattern here, why would we not prefer to let him learn and grow from this? We all get to accidentally drop the prod DB once, since that’s what teaches us not to do it again.

He's not some junior developer with his first job, he's the senior editor. If a senior editor plagiarized an article, he would rightly be fired because it's a serious violation of journalistic ethics. He knew using AI tools like that was against company policy and he did it anyway. That's well beyond just making a mistake.

There are degrees of plagiarism and you could argue this is not really plagiarism at all. Paraphrasing instead of directly quoting is probably about as mild as it can get. Most publications wouldn’t even note the mistake.

This wasn't paraphrasing either. The tool couldn't access the subject's website and instead fabricated quotes, which Benj nor anyone in the editorial process bothered to vet.

> he should be fired for it.

If anyone who makes a mistake rarely and owns it completely shall be fired, everyone would be homeless.

To err is human, so owning what you did. This is the first time I have seen Ars to make a mistake of this kind in any size, so I think this is a good corrective bump given Ars' track report on these matters.

Maybe we should learn to be a bit flexible and understanding sometimes. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and we don't need more of that right now.

I agree, I think this should be taken in context and his past work should be reviewed by Ars to ensure this isn’t a pattern. If he made a mistake one time this is a learning experience and I doubt he would ever make it again. You don’t need to fire someone every time they make a mistake. Especially if the mistake was made in good faith.

> (...) he should be fired for it.

I don't know about that - I'd say it's the managers responsibility to make sure employees don't feel pressured to work when they're to ill to function.

And also brings to mind the IBM one million dollars story:

(...)

A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no, Thomas J. Watson Sr.—needed every deal. Unfortunately, the salesman failed. IBM lost the bid. That day, the sales rep showed up at Mr. Watson’s office. He sat down and rested an envelope with his resignation on the CEO’s desk. Without looking, Mr. Watson knew what it was. He was expecting it.

He asked, “What happened?”

The sales rep outlined every step of the deal. He highlighted where mistakes had been made and what he could have done differently. Finally he said, “Thank you, Mr. Watson, for giving me a chance to explain. I know we needed this deal. I know what it meant to us.” He rose to leave.

Tom Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye and handed the envelope back to him saying, “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?”

Did it happen? I'd like to believe it but it's a lot of money even now and in Thomas Watson's time it was worth a great deal more.

Okay. I've been harsh on Ars Technica in these comments, and I'm going to continue to hold an asterisk in my head whenever I see them cited as a source going forward. However, at least one thing in this apology does seem more reasonable than people have made it out to be: I think it's fine for reporters at an AI-skeptical outlet to play around with various AI tools in their work. Benj Edwards should have been way more cautious, but I think that people should be making periodic contact with the state of these tools (and their pitfalls!), especially if they're going to opine.[1]

We don't know yet how widespread these practices are at Ars Technica, or whether this is a one-off. But if it went down like he says it did here, then the coincidental nature of this mistake -- i.e., that it's an AI user error in reporting an AI novel behavior story at an AI-skeptical outlet -- merely makes it ironic, not more egregious than it already is.

[1] Edit: I read and agreed with ilamont's new comment elsewhere in this thread, right after posting this. It's a very reasonable caveat! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029193

That's a poor mea culpa. It begins with a preamble attempting to garner sympathy from the reader before it gets to the acknowledgement of the error, which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity.

> which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity

That’s not sleight-of-hand, I think we all immediately recognize it for what it is. Whether it is good form to lead with an excuse is a matter of opinion, but it’s not deceptive.

I speculate that curious minds, with a forensic inclination and free time, will go back to previous articles and find out it happened before...When you see a cockroach...

It's not really important whether it's a one-off thing with this one guy, he's not relevant in the big picture. To the extent that he deindividualizes his labor he's just one more fungible operator of AI anyway.

People are making a bigger deal about it than this one article or site warrants because of ongoing discourse about whether LLM tech will regularly and inevitably lead to these mistakes. We're all starting to get sick of hearing about it, but this keeps happening.

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