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Comment by petterroea | Hacker News Reader

It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.

I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.

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All they had to do was write a clear and simple message saying that one of their staff was responsible, has been fired, and they'll take steps to avoid this in future.

Their actions so far just make me think they're panicking and found a scapegoat to blame it on, but they're not going to put any new checks in place so it'll just happen again.

It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that.

I feel bad for the guy, but there's just no way I can imagine much better safeguards other than editors paying more close attention to referencing sources, and hiring more reliable people.

Yes, those are exactly the kind of steps they would need to publicly commit to in order to retain trust. And yet, instead we get silence, no acceptance that some measure of responsibility falls on the editorial team here. So it's clear they just hope it'll blow over without them having to do anything, which is the opposite of what a trustworthy site would do.

You have to give them time to do the job properly as well. Companies will often pay lip service to standards then squeeze their staff so much those standards are impossible to attain.

> It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that.

More than that, as a reporter on AI he should have been fully aware that AI frequently bullshits and lies. He should have known it was not reliable and that its output needs to be carefully verified by a human if you care at all about the accuracy or quality of what it gives you. His excuse that this was done in a fever induced state of madness feels weak when it was his whole job to know that AI was not an appropriate tool for the task.

>his whole job

Possibly akin to a roofer taking a shortcut up there, then taking a spill? You knew better but unfortunately let the fact that you could probably get away with it with zero impact decide for you.

IIRC hallucinations were essentially kicked off initially by user error, or rather… let’s say at least: a journalist using the best available technologies should have been able to reduce the chance of this big of an issue to near zero, even with language models in the loop & without human review.

(e.g. imagine Karpathy’s llm-council with extra harnessing/scripting, so even MORE expensive, but still. Or some RegEx!)

Alternatively… there was no AI error, the reporter made up the quotes, and lied when they were challenged.

The chance that the very first time AI was used it screwed up and was caught is pretty low.

It’s likely been used before but nobody got caught.

Are you familiar with the reporter's work & reputation?

Are we talking about the same guy who purportedly never even read an article with their name on it containing multiple insulting false quotes and was summarily dismissed?

Mind you, I’m not purporting malice but their choosing the blame AI rather than brain fog, bad notes, accidental transcription, or any other human error which would us look down upon them more.

Right now, AI errors like this are excusable. Soon they won’t be.

AnonC doesn't seem to be upset that the journalist was fired. The disappointment comes from Ars trying to brush this entire situation away by deleting articles, comments, and making no statement on their website.

My understanding is that AnonC is upset at Ars not taking the mature approach by allowing this to become a learning moment for the employee and using it to double down and confirm their stance on AI generated content. There's strength in maturity. But I am doing some reading between the lines, and I'm possibly reading a bit too much into "There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues"

Reminds me of a story I was told as an intern deploying infra changes to prod for the first time. Some guy had accidentally caused hours of downtime, and was expecting to be fired, only for his boss to say "Those hours of downtime is the price we pay to train our staff (you) to be careful. If we fire you, we throw the investment out the window"

There is a difference between an error and totally misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no sympathy for journalists getting caught producing hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and should always result in that person being fired.

Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let that shit through code review, and a customer impacting outage results, that should be instant termination. But it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to be held "blameless" right?

Joirnalist job was not to review ai-slop. That is rather crucial difference.

I love vibe coding but you are absolutely right. We're at the stage where vibe coding is a fun way to produce sloppy software and that's fine if the intended user is just yourself and you're fully informed about what you're getting into. But actually shipping vibe coded slop to other people is wacky, anybody doing the needs to be manually reviewing every commit very carefully and needs to be prepared to accept personal responsibility for anything that slips by.

The problem is that reviewing code for correctness is harder than writing correct code. So these things will always slip through review. I'm a little bit divided here whether we can (or should) blame a reviewer too harshly for letting broken code through review whether it's LLM or human generated.

I've worked on teams with a rubber stamp review culture where you're seen as a problem if you "slow things down" too much with thorough review. I've also worked on teams that see value in correctness and rigor. I've never worked on a team where a reviewer is putting their job on the line every time they click "Approve". And culturally, I'm not sure I'd want to.

That said I think it's pretty clear we need mechanisms that better hold engineers to account for signing off on things they shouldn't have. In some engineering domains you can lose your license for this kind of thing, and I feel like we need some analogous structure for the profession of software engineering.

Hence why software engineers aren't an actual professional licensed engineers.

"Make sure quotes in your article are things the subject actually said to you" is not something that should need a "learning moment".

Accidentally taking down production should not lead to firing. It should lead to improved process

Making up quotes for article, with technology or not, should lead to firing.

"should lead to firing..."

... and, also, improved processes. There should be no way an individual writer can damage the brand to this extent with absolutely no checks or oversight. This was just an error, but a bad actor could've put something far, far worse out there.

Even an automated quote-checker might have helped in this case.

Fact checking is a vital part of the editorial process and clearly that process failed here. Tech people often have a double standard when it comes to journalism--rules for thee but not for me. However the structure is fairly analogous, in that both professions ship under lots of time pressure where mistakes can be costly. I'm not sure, honestly, who is most at fault here or why only the reporter was terminated. But my comment above was to highlight that there shouldn't be a double standard--if you think a journalist should be fired for this kind of error it would be inconsistent to believe a software engineer shouldn't.

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