[icegreentea2]

Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).

[driggs]

Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.

He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.

[petterroea]

Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?

[stevekemp]

There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.

So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.

(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)

[randallsquared]

Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.

[sva_]

Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.

[hluska]

I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:

1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.

2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.

3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.

I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.

That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.

As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.

[vor_]

What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.

[belter]

He did not even mentioned the Dow...