Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
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Not to jump on this post too much, but the AI ethics discussion ended in 2020 when Google fired their AI ethics department for doing ethics. There’s nothing to write about.
I think the self hosting article would be interesting; my experience has been that it’s mostly a waste of time, money, and intellectual capacity and I’d like to see something on the topic that isn’t just a bunch of people posting their very expensive collections of GPUs on Reddit for fake internet points.
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"bolded part mine" breaks the rule. You may not add boldface, italics, or any other formatting change to what you quote.
Aurich said he frequently doesn't bother to enforce when it's just a "bolded mine" but he did not state that he WOULDN'T enforce, or that it DOESN'T break the rule.
As a Navy veteran, allow me to translate: you might be able to get away with that shit right now, but one day it's going to bite you in the ass, and you won't be expecting it "because I always used to get away with it."
As an Ars Technica veteran, allow me to back myself up as a Navy veteran, because I flouted that rule (with benign intent) for YEARS without ever catching any pushback for it, until this weekend, when I got that pushback.
Keep it simple and clean: don't add shit inside the quote tag that wasn't there in the first place.
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Unless there's something I'm not catching, what's wrong with a sex tourism trip that would prevent a person from being a crossing guard. Crossing guards usually work with children, sex tourists have sex with adults. I'm not seeing the overlap.
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Hmm. I encountered Andie MacDowell at an airport once, so I guess 2?
No, but I was a pretty good home cook even before discovering Ethan Chlebowski's YouTube channel. So, I basically stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, is what I'm saying.
Yes, several times, and not really.
Oh hell no. Have you met me? I handle my own annoyances. I am not a subtle man.
Does a US Navy ice cream suit count? Also, does Epcot count?
Definitely not.
No, I distinctly remember picking up the tab the last time we went out for drinks. It's your turn, you filthy chiseler!
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I was literally preparing to write something along these lines until I saw this comment.
This is the part that worries me, because it shifts from "What if I have no job or income" to "what if I have no job or income, and also everything sucks at least 10% more"
To be clear, this relates to a compulsion for "accuracy" that redoubles into anxiety for me, so when I say "everything sucks at least 10% more", I'm talking about the implied influx of replacement with "Good enough" LLMs that keep generating inaccurate shit.
To say nothing of my broader feelings on how it affects art, which is core to my personal life.
Getting to go from personal anxieties to the broader concept of depressing thoughts about all generated writing, music, and moving pictures being at least a little bit more bland and worse is just…not really something I want, but feels entirely too much within reach.
I watch TV on DVD, simply because the market for TV on Blu-ray is apparently garbage and no one will release anything. Shout! Factory will never give me that ALF: The Complete Series 4K box set. Alas!
That said, curiously enough, I actually have The Man From Earth (and its sequel, though I've yet to watch either: my backlog is absurd) on Blu-ray rather than DVD. it's definitely out there. (I also still have the DVD I never watched.
Seriously: my backlog is awful.)
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There are countries VERY well known for facilitating child sex tourism.
Most of them are the same countries known for sex tourism at all.
I don't have a problem with someone consensually using the services of a sex worker, but the phrase "sex tourism" frequently means abusing "marriage services" even when it doesn't mean abusing children. It's not really a label anyone should want hung on them, even if they're an out and proud hedonist.
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Am I really the only one who's noticed something about the post Jim was replying to?
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I think he was asking about splitting a phrase into its own quote box for emphasis, as a clunky alternative to bolding, if the latter's going to be disallowed. (I often use bolding myself, since it preserves context while highlighting the key bit I'm addressing, like asking about a potential typo.)
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Sadly, I don't know what an agent is. I listened to three presentations about AI agents so far, one about "Google's AI agent", one from an ERP company, and one from an CRM company. From my take, an "AI agent" can be just about anything the company wants them to be.
But, I find the term "agent" to be extremely toxic, because it implies they have agency, or the ability to make independent decisions. For example, a travel agent (a person travel agent) would get to know the client, identify what the interest are, and then make a travel plan that may not include exactly what the client wants, but could be of interest to them. A travel agent, in this case, generates value.
These AI agents, such as what Google pushes, does not have agency since it's based on LLM/ AI. In the presentation I watched, the person who was pushing Google Notebook LM was telling us all about how quickly it can create presentations using existing reports, and then he used NotebookLM to generate the presentation.. He also said NotebookLM can make podcasts of reports, and it can even be used to learn a language by generating flashcards. In all three of those cases, I asked him to show the presentation, listen to the podcast, or explain how flashcards can result in learning a new language, and there wasn't enough time for him to show us in detail (I wonder why...). These agents, in this case, generate outputs.
Outputs may not be of value. Outputs are things that people could use to generate value, but are not valuable in of itself. But by calling them agents implies they have agency, and are on par of the value actual agents, like travel agents, can generate for clients.
Making that type of mental switch is extremely dangerous I believe.
So let's call AI agents what they really are - a computer script that generates an outcome.
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I am a parent and I refrained from saying it earlier but you are making exactly the same error people who say all gay and transgender people are pedophiles make. I didn’t reply before because I was giving you the benefit of the doubt but perhaps I shouldn’t have.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
National-level recognition may come into it. How many New Zealands worth of fame is national fame in the USA worth? Is it proportional to population? Are you world famous in New Zealand? Can we use a "New Zealand" as a unit of fame, in the same way that one Fripp is equivalent to 12 ordinary guitarists? Is a Salter equivalent to good lemonish stuff?
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I'd like to see them take a look at Ed Zitron's analysis of how much money OpenAI is burning through every year and see whether they think it's pretty much on the money or most likely off the mark. Of everything Ars doesn't already do, this is what I want the most.
I also want continued coverage of copyright related issues and lawyers getting in trouble for AI-drafted court documents.
Even though I'm an AI skeptic myself, lower-case, no underscore, I would like them to continue to cover new AI product releases and do user-experience write-ups on what using AI tools is like.
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PTO for me and everyone I hang out with has always meant your "vacation" time, or whatever else you want to take time off for. Have a doctor's appointment? PTO. Shitting your brains out and can't come in? PTO. Taking a week to sit on a beach and do nothing? PTO. Most places I've been have allowed PTO to be taken down to whatever minimum time unit they use for time tracking (0.25 or 0.10 hour).
I've always had holidays (days the "office" is closed and you're not expected to work, but you get paid for) and PTO (generic Paid Time Off that is your business). Some places have also given separate sick time, which is just PTO that's supposed to be limited to health reasons, but fuck it, mental health is health too so if you need a day to turn your brain off I'm OKing it.
The real scam is "unlimited PTO." What that actually means is beg every time you need to take time off, and when they let you go, there's not accrued PTO to be paid out.
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I think it's germane to the discussion, because this incident has brought into question what Ars's role should be in reporting on AI. As for the discussion of ethics, the fact that the companies purveying it have abdicated their responsibility makes it all the more important for outlets like Ars to shine a light on their conduct, and the conduct of those using their tools, and also facilitating the discussion on what is and isn't ok as we figure out what the rule of these tools in our society. I see it as no different from the reporting on copyright trolls in years past.
I can speak for one instance where I found a locally hosted LLM to be beneficial. Last year I stepped outside of my technical comfort zone, into the business side of things. I had to make a business case for some millions of dollars in funding for a project I thought would be beneficial to my company, and present it to an audience that included directors and veeps. I spent an agonizing week crafting that presentation to the best of my ability (to say nothing of the weeks of research and evaluation before that), but it still wasn't good enough. I wasn't going to feed it into one of the major services for feedback because it contained proprietary company information, but I was able to feed it into one I hosted myself, and get good feedback on ways I could improve it. I also got good tips on how to present it.
Could I have gotten that feedback from peers? I absolutely could, and I did, and I incorporated some of their suggestions too. But humans are busy and have short attention spans, where the LLM was able to give more detailed and nuanced feedback.
One might make the case that I should have just failed and grown from the experience, but I want this thing, and nobody else will make it happen. I think it will work better than the thing we have today, and also save my company money in the long run.
I think there are cases like that where these tools can be used responsibly, augmenting and sharpening our own skills rather than replacing or rotting them. Those are the cases I'd like to explore.
I'm as fatigued as everyone else with the proliferation of AI slop and the current state of PC hardware in the wake of this bubble, but I'm also excited for the potential of these tools as an enabler of personal growth and for unlocking human potential.
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To be clear, I have never engaged in sex tourism and never intend to but I think you are potentially libeling the Netherlands, Germany, and possibly other countries I don’t know about with different laws than the majority of US states. Hell, you might be libeling Nevada and that’s an accomplishment.
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Specifically on this subject, we have a GPT of some sort running at work. It's honestly pretty great for first-run edits.
The feedback isn't all good, but it does still catch a lot that reduces subsequent back-and-forth without basically doubling up time that could be spend on something more productive than "This line is confusing", "Didn't this get covered earlier in the procedure?", and so on.
Like any tool, it has it's uses.
The problem is that--also like any tool--it can't be the only one in the toolbox. Right now AI companies are trying to replace the entire toolbox with fence pliers.
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With respect, you don’t know that. I’ve had a high fever or two in my time and you do not think clearly. If you try to work you’re apt to do whatever gets you horizontal again in the shortest time.
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I've had numerous fevers and other sicknesses in my time. I've never once broken a fundamental tenement of my profession because of it. I either stayed home, or due to U.S. employment conditions, I went to work and got very little or nothing productive done.
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I don't think (sic) is needed here. It's a convention used to indicate that the error is in the original quote, not introduced during transcription. On forums, the quote formatting makes it's abundantly clear that the error is in the original quoted text, and the transcription is automatic.
However, ellipses serve a useful purpose when used sensibly, for example to reply to two related paragraphs separated by an unrelated digression. Trimming the quote to include the relevant content separated by an ellipse is far more readable than quoting twice (or, even worse, avoiding quote trimming altogether). Just as long as the ellipses aren't used maliciously to omit words and change meaning.
But, given the zero-tolerance approach highlighted above, I may just err on the side of caution and put several quote boxes one after another in place of ellipses. Better than breaking the rules.
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Sure, sure. The kind of fever you can't get out of bed from, but you can certainly write up an article against a deadline.
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Jeez don't give them any more ideas, Americans will already use anything but the metric system for measuring, and you're adding more options.. are you mad?
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milquetoast, FWIW
On another note, one thing that I haven't seen anyone raise in hundreds of comments so far:
Benj has previously indicated he is suffering from Long Covid. I am not an employment lawyer, but I think someone could try to make the case that a) this is a disability, and b) his disability contributed to his foul-up with the quotations.
If so, that would make it potentially risky to fire him, which may impact the final decision (and maybe extend the timeline to reach such a decision).
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I remember when I was working in IT, I had one of the worst stomach-bugs I can ever recall, but there was an emergency at work so they guilt-tripped me into fixing it from home. So I ended up spending two days recovering their systems from a botched upgrade, from bed, while simultaneously hanging my head over a bucket due to the nausea.Sure, sure. The kind of fever you can't get out of bed from, but you can certainly write up an article against a deadline.
By all rights that cluster should be toast. There's no way I was in any condition to fix it, I wasn't thinking clearly at all, and took shortcuts because I just didn't have the energy to do it properly.
People will do crazy things if they feel they have to, or to show their dedication. Remediating systems while barely being able to sit upright. Applying emergency patches on Saturday night after half a bottle of wine. Writing articles while totally knocked out by Covid. They will probably consider that they're "going the extra mile" by doing it. But there should be processes in place to stop them from doing stupid things like that.
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I haven't seen anyone post this here in the comments, but Scott posted part 3 as an update, including that he requested Ars to restore the original article in full, but obviously with explanations of why it was retracted.
He also links to the post-incidence blog post from (supposedly) the real human owner of the agent.
He also links to the post-incidence blog post from (supposedly) the real human owner of the agent.
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The things Benj did would have made for a good article in itself, if that was the twist to the original story.
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I assume they’re referring to the fact it appears to quote you saying “…” and nothing else - though as it appears to be a manual quote (it doesn’t link to a post), it’s possibly seen as a slightly different situation and since I haven’t committed to digging through all the comments I take no position on whether or not you had said “…”Then no, I probably didn't.
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When I hear the phrase "sex tourism" used, it's more frequently applied to Thailand, the Philippines, and Russia.
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The old “I was just doing a social experiment” excuse rears its head once more. Truly, a classic.
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Well I'll be damned. No, I didn't use an ellipsis in the post doughnut was replying to!
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Wow, I've finally made it to the end. Not got much to add, other than that I'm another regular who's watching closely for a full and frank follow-up.
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Perhaps a compromise is to quote the entire post and then copy/paste the relevant part within the quote reply. That way the part that is specifically being replied to can be seen in context.
"bolded part mine" breaks the rule. You may not add boldface, italics, or any other formatting change to what you quote.
Does this break the rule? I did include the entire unmodified quote above.
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