[water-data-dude]

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

[bojan]

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.

[sli]

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.

[0_____0]

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.

[robocat]

> 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.

[wavemode]

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

[arduanika]

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

[vor_]

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.

[adriand]

> 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.

[belter]

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...

[gdulli]

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.