Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

See full article...

 

[Resistance]

I'll expect nothing short of a full, deep-dive explanation from Ars in a few days. This is quite the event.

Agreed, I am absolutely willing to give ars some time to produce a quality response, especially considering the weekend timing of the incident. The response so far is sufficient as a temporary measure.

 

[Resistance]

Please elaborate - exactly how can fabricated quotations be published in a manner consistent with the policy?

The elaboration is right here:

Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes.

 

[Resistance]

1. You took way too long to post this retraction.
2. You're not explaining what's going to happen to whoever is responsible for this.
3. How many other articles have been leaning on the use of AI? You're leaving us with a ton of questions and little to no answers.

You've already lost a lot of credibility with me over this having happened at all, and your response to this is losing you even more credibility. I'm incredibly disappointed and ready to just delete my account, my bookmark, and start looking for a more responsible tech news site.

a more responsible tech news site

Good luck with that.

 

[Resistance]

I would at the very least expect a thorough investigation in the responsible authors previous works as soon as it can reasonably be done, and frankly I think the responsible party should own up as soon as possible because there are two names on the article and every second this is left in doubt is doing damage to both of their credibility.

And perhaps the general policy of regurgitating AI-related press releases (many of which are done by one of the authors of the now-retracted article) should be reconsidered as well, repeating outlandish claims with zero validation is not journalism. Presenting it as <company says> is still amplifying their message.

One thing I think is important to remember is the possibility that one of the two writers was completely unaware of the use of AI by the other party. It is unreasonable and actively harmful to collaboration if the two parties in a collaborative effort are expected to distrust one another to the point of fact checking everything the other party writes. So I believe it may be important to extend grace and understanding to the party that let the error slip through.

As for the editor that (presumably) reviewed the article before publication, I'm not sure how I feel, it really depends on the internal policies on what is expected of them, and I suspect that these policies may change.

 

[Resistance]

Occam's razor says that this is probably the case. But given that this whole topic is a miasma of AI generated bullshit, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that when writing this article, the authors found an article with fake AI-generated quotes, used them, and said article has since been deleted.

Better evidence is the fact that the fake quotes in the retracted article contained a "Shambaugh wrote", with a link to Shambaugh's own blog post which didn't contain those quotes. It's hard to imagine they'd get those quotes from a third-party article but link back to Shambaugh's post.

Hard but not impossible... aww who am I kidding, it's darn near impossible. There must be some bias in me that wants to protect my perception of ars and the integrity of it's journalists.

 

[Resistance]

well now i have to ask - how many AI generated articles have I read on ArsTechnica? I already pay for Claude, and am wrapping up a dual amd 9950x3d + dual 3090 home AI box, should i just have my clawbot scan /other/ news sites and fill me in?

You do not have and will not have a "dual amd 9950x3d" system because there are no motherboards that support that configuration.

 

[Resistance]

Kyle Orland has a post on Bluesky indicating that Ars is still actively looking into the breach of trust here.

Edit: Beaten to the punch. Leaving this here as the spoilered copied images are an easier reading format.

Benj Edwards has replied:

Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below

Spoiler: big images

 

[Resistance]

So I guess everybody believes I'm a terrible person now. I know the article was probably about me, which is the kind of thing I'm dealing with now. I don't have any experience on social media, and very often I follow the advice of others on what to do. My family friends, most of the neighborhood, quite a few of my coworkers, feel bad for me and know I'm a good person. If people say I should generally not leave personal information on social media like my mom, then sometimes I follow their advice, but you're dealing with someone who was already extremely depressed (fill in the blank), on top of sleep deprivation, on top of mental illness, so obviously I can't really write an autobiography in those conditions. Nobody can. Some of my coworkers, people who actually know me in real life, have said, "Poor guy," and "What they're doing to him is disgusting," So yeah, people think I'm this terrible person, and I've never been as depressed as I am now. I wish there was a way to reach a lot of people again. If I knew what was out there, I could at least try to defend myself, but now that seems unlikely, given that everyone hates me now.

AI;dr

 

[Resistance]

Well this should be unacceptable on several levels. Using AI to "list structured references I could put in my outline" isn't as lazy as just telling it to write the article for you but, as we've all seen, it still introduces hallucinations into your workflow. That's what the policy is supposed to avoid, isn't it?

I'm willing to extend a tiny bit of grace here. Guy whose job it is to learn about and report on AI finds out about a new tool that is advertised as being suitable for extracting verbatim quotes and decides to try it out, in a haze of illness he fucks up very badly.

COVID often really fucks with your cognitive function, the first mistake was to continue working when sick, and that mistake can be partially attributed to the illness itself, as can all the following mistakes.

This explanation, even if you remove COVID from the equation, is slightly less troubling than what I had assumed.

I'm not sure what the best way to move forward is, personally I would like to continue reading reporting by Benj Edwards here on ars.

 

[Resistance]

They were specifically requested not to comment until Ars management had said their piece in public. Presumably, once the retraction note was posted, they were clear to make their own statements public.

I don't think it's unreasonable for Benj to make a public post taking responsibility for the screwup, especially if it's after management has said, "right, we've said our piece, go nuts". It's the responsible thing to do, especially since there are two potential culprits.

Now it's for Ars management to look at what Benj (in particular) has to say - both in public and in private - and decide what to do, and how much to make public about the process. My view is that more transparency is better, with the caveat that there are good reasons to keep some of the details behind closed doors, sometimes.

We only know that Kyle was asked not to comment.

 

[Resistance]

I am starting to be less pissed off at Ben for putting fabricated quotes into his article and more pissed off at Ars for making him choose between working while having COVID and having less PTO for recreation. (I know that Ars is not the only company that does this, but it is a stupid policy that results in incidents like this.)

A policy like this incentivizes employees to work sick, which means poor quality work is incentivized. Poor quality work should not be incentivized.

It is that fucking simple.

 

[Resistance]

Indeed, the old saying "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" has stuck around for good reason. In this case, putting the notice of retraction, link to retraction article(s), a {strike} around the whole original article and delisting it, but leaving it up with the comments thread up as well (but locked from further replies) seems like a better response. Nothing to hide, no links broken, people can see what happened, while also having it be very clear that it's retracted.


Maybe with the ever rising tide of AI, journalism organizations will start having to treat people more like aircraft pilots or the like, where if someone is sick enough it's effectively a "safety risk" and they should just be outright forbidden from any further work (enforce it technically too! disable the VPN etc) until they're recovered. Or at least any public facing work, maybe doing some equivalent of desktop clean up is ok, but nothing in the hot seat. Both for them and for the org. It's true that a lot of people might just try to work remotely normally but perhaps enforcing stronger work/life separation (you will take some time and relax and you will like it ) in this age of blurring lines.

At first I agreed with you, upvoted, and moved on. But then I thought about the implications of doing this in today's world.

5 years ago that would have been an ideal response. Because a human encountering a page of strikethrough text braketed with warnings could reliably be expected to interpret the article as intended.

However ai cannot be trusted to do this and therefore any misinformation contained in the article could be spread to unknowing humans by ai.

There needs to be a more careful solution.

 

[Resistance]

It's an excuse because people don't think it's a reasonable justification.

It's an explanation, not a justification. Any proper apology requires the person apologizing to explain all the significant contributing factors to why the misconduct happened. Faulting someone for including information that should be included is absurd.

 

[Resistance]

We don't know if the Ars culture and leadership directly or indirectly pressured him to work while sick. Or if he chose to do that to himself. My employer offers plenty of sick leave and encourages people to not work while ill. But some individuals, either because of pressure from their direct management (against the spirit of the company policy on sick leave) or their own decisions, will work while ill anyway.

or their own decisions, will work while ill anyway

That's still a failure that can be partially attributed to management.

 

[Resistance]

I'm pretty sure I've read every comment in this thread (up to #430) and I have evolved my opinion throughout.

For the purposes of argument (and because it won't change the conclusion (except where otherwise noted)) I will take the most charitable interpretation of what has happened and that interpretation is:

Edwards believed that the tool he was using was actually going to perform as advertised.
That belief was reasonable (I haven't looked into it, I can imagine an architecture that would function in a way that would reliably allow it to only output verbatim quotes).
This was the first use of a tool like this to produce an article submitted to ars by Edwards for publication.
The article contained falsified quotes that were not defamatory or substantially harmful (I haven't read the quotes, reminder, this is the most charitable interpretation)
Edwards was so sick he was not capable of making good decisions.
Edwards is a bit of an AI aficionado and his judgment was influenced by this.

When working as an author of any kind, you must own your output, you are responsible for what you produce, that requires you to take the upmost care in reviewing anything you did not write yourself, including quotes, references, and output of computer tools including but not limited to LLMs.

I personally do not believe that the above interpretation rises to the the level of requiring a termination (this is that otherwise noted part) however there is more that needs to be considered:

Many in the community believe the appropriate response should be termination and failure to do this would permanently damage the reputation and culture of ars (both internal and external).

Even if I may not think he should go, the risks that come from retaining him are significant enough that I lean on the termination side of things. If there were no new developments beyond an update stating what happened I would continue to read ars and would not be dissuaded from subscribing, but I'm not everyone. The opinion of the community and the risks to the culture of the team are high enough that the best outcome would probably be a resignation, after that, a termination.

 

[Resistance]

i want to lodge a formal complaint with the administrator of this server
this mmo kind of sucks right now, this whole LLM plotline is dumb bullshit
the mechanic shouldn't even be part of the game
this game was broken enough before LLMs were introduced
it feels like this game jumped the shark when the gorilla was shot

*Yes I'm aware of the other much more significant issues like random permanent debuffs applied during character creation and economy balance issues, I'm pantomiming an entitled whale.

 

[Resistance]

Normally, the editor would be the fact checker. For the "fake text", it was a fake quote, and something an editor would not be able to check. Ars burned their sources.

their sources

I hadn't considered this, reduced credibility with sources could be one of the biggest negative consequences for ars should Edwards continue to be employed. And it might not manifest in particularly obvious ways, fewer high quality tips, more guarded responses to requests for comment, more refusals to comment, less collaboration in general.

As much as I want Edwards to stay, that outcome would be so toxic to ars that the negative consequences would likely vastly outweigh the positive ones.

 

[Resistance]

The honorable thing would be for Benj to resign without waiting to be fired. Ars should publish the resignation letter as part of the post-mortem process. I can't believe it took 12 pages of comments before someone says this.

I realize there are real ramifications for unemployment benefits and health insurance when you resign instead of being fired, but it is still the right thing to do.

As for the article itself, clearly you don't want the AI hallucinations on the web because they will spread. That said, the rest of the article is fundamentally sound. It should be put back up with a heading note explaining what happened, and most importantly, with the AI garbage removed. Mark the deletions. Maybe put in legit quotes in their place. That should fix the issues.

Put the comments back. Ars placing a comment at the place where the original comments ended.

And yes, a full and public post-mortem.

I also wonder how much influence the parent company Conde Nast is exerting here.

I apologize for any typos because I am seeing serious input lag while typing this.

Right here, three pages ago.

As for resignation vs firing. If Edwards is going to leave ars and he has sufficient savings to make benefits not too big an issue, I think resignation makes future career prospects as a journalist better than if he was fired.

 

[Resistance]

I have been a regular reader of Ars for over a decade. While Benj's linked apology is definitely worthwhile (a good apology makes a huge difference vs. a defensive-asshole stance), I believe any journalistic or creative enterprise should take a zero-tolerance stance towards AI tools. My initial instinct is that the writer making the error should be fired.

But I just said a good apology makes a difference, and I believe that. I would like to see a full postmortem published next week, with Benj's apology included in full, and a statement that he (and all Ars staff) will refrain from using AI tools in their work going forward, full stop. With appropriate apologies and lesson-learning, I think I am fine with a one-strike rule. Otherwise, Ars is losing a reader.

I'm on the fence about zero tolerance for using AI in this line of work. First, it's completely unenforceable for remote work. Second, we don't know what the future holds for this tech and its perception. Third, I think the best policy is to have those that submit work be accountable for what they submit, regardless of how it is produced.

 

[Resistance]

Honestly, I'm really mixed on this, and the more I think about it, the less sensical it sounds. He used a "Claude Code based AI tool" to extract quotes from websites. Claude Code doesn't extract text from websites - it's a coding environment. Per his apology, he developed a tool in Claude Code that scraped webpages for quotes, it didn't work as expected. He then posted the error in ChatGPT. Which lead to the misattributed quote.

Which makes no sense to me. Because how would ChatGPT generate a fake quote if he's asking for advice on an error.

Somebody - anybody - please walk me through his apology, and explain how the quote is developed from his apology?

Regarding the "Experimental Claude Code Based AI Tool" that Mr. Edwards mentioned on BlueSky: Per Claude,

"Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that reads your codebase, edits files, and runs commands. It works in your terminal, IDE, browser, and as a desktop app."

Did Mr. Edwards try coding his own program, using Claude, to pull quotes from websites? Claude Code is not designed to read text from websites, to my knowledge (but I hope someone corrects me).

No need to repeat yourself. If you don't know which tool is being talked about then ask, if you don't know anything about the tool the tool in question is pro-ported to use, maybe don't skim the first result and then proceed to speculate.

 

[Resistance]

For everyone brandishing the pitchforks I suggest you read this Columbia Journalism Review.

Some journalists that are using AI:

Gina Chua​

EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF SEMAFOR

Nicholas Thompson​

CEO OF THE ATLANTIC

Zach Seward​

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR OF AI INITIATIVES AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Millie Tran​

CHIEF DIGITAL CONTENT OFFICER AT THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

Sarah Cahlan​

PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING REPORTER AND FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE VISUAL FORENSICS TEAM AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Jason Koebler​

COFOUNDER OF 404 MEDIA

Khari Johnson​

TECH REPORTER AT CALMATTERS AND PRACTITIONER FELLOW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA’S KARSH INSTITUTE OF DEMOCRACY WHO HAS COVERED AI FOR A DECADE

Araceli Gómez-Aldana​

NEWS REPORTER AND ANCHOR AT WBEZ IN CHICAGO, AND 2023 WINNER OF THE JOHN S. KNIGHT JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIP AT STANFORD

Ben Welsh​

FOUNDER OF THE REUTERS NEWS APPLICATIONS DESK, WHERE HE LEADS THE DEVELOPMENT OF DASHBOARDS, DATABASES, AND OTHER AUTOMATED SYSTEMS

Susie Cagle​

A WRITER AND ARTIST FOR PROPUBLICA, THE GUARDIAN, WIRED, THE NATION, AND MANY OTHERS

Ina Fried​

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT FOR AXIOSAND AUTHOR OF THE DAILY AXIOS AI+ NEWSLETTER

David Carson​

A JOHN S. KNIGHT JOURNALISM FELLOW AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY, ON LEAVE FROM HIS JOB AS STAFF PHOTOJOURNALIST AT THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Did you read the article you linked, cause I've read the first dozen or so paragraphs and it doesn't support the point you're making, edit: in fact much of it does exactly the opposite. Edit2: Holy shit, you couldn't have picked a better article to advocate for the exact opposite of your point. Please tell me this post was some kind of joke cause it's that fucking hilarious.

Edit: I'm halfway though, it's a good read and is absolutely something people in this thread would be interested in.
Edit 3: Seriously, read it, it's basically a bunch of seemingly highly qualified individuals giving their takes on AI use in journalism with lots of citations and examples (I've got like 10 new tabs open and I'm not finished.

 

[Resistance]

No, but he had a LLM pluck a couple of select quotes* out of it.

Too soon

 

[Resistance]

Multiple times. Each one of those authors describes how they are using AI. Or you could read about how CJR itself uses AI.

But I understand they are not members of your echo chamber.

Which section of that article do you feel best supports your position?

 

[Resistance]

You got “they” from one persons quote? Didn’t bother to read the article or spend two minutes to find out who the CJR is.

Take you one line hot takes back to X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

 

[Resistance]

Lol the comebacks are weakening in the thread…

At this hour it is unreasonable to expect peak wit.

 

[Resistance]

oh shit. you're absolutely correct. that was a typo. it's a single 9950x3d and dual 3090. that was an honest mistake. It's in a Gigabyte Aorus XTreme AI TOP motherboard which we can all agree is a single CPU board as well.

edit hilariously I had to edit this post because I misspelled typo.

Those 3090s are really popular for AI workloads, they must have cost a small fortune, I'm a bit out of the loop as I haven't found much use for local AI and don't have the budget for it,

1. why did you choose those over a mac mini or an ai max system?
2. Can you pool the memory on the 3090s?
3. Is the extra cache on the x3d really worth it, is the extra performance of a high end CPU worth it?
4. If yes for 3, why not go for an epyc or threadripper?

 

[Resistance]

Deserves his day in court?

Don't bother. The court of public opinion has already delivered their verdict. No trial required. No follow-up. No merits. No facts. No dialogue.

They want him terminated; to feed their innermost primitive cravings for "justice".

In fact, they won't even let the principal editor handle it. They're already waiving their threats, and throwing "or else" around - using financial pressure to force "their" decision.

It's ugly. No, actually it's despicable. And really disappointing. I always told myself Ars regulars were an intellectual, thoughtful and ethically sound bunch. What. A. Shit-show.

This isn't about justice for most people, certainly not for me. This is about preserving the credibility of ars for:
1. The readers, who value high quality, accurate, precise, and well delivered reporting.
2. The sources, who value accurate reporting of anything they communicate to ars journalists.
3. The staff, who value all the above.
4. The organization, which values all the above, and wants staff that value the above, something that is less likely should enforcement of policies and standards meant to ensure the above are upheld.

Justice would mean that Edwards would change his behaviour and keep his job. Firing him is unjust, the single instance infraction in and of itself is relatively minor and justice demands the least harmful outcome for all involved, the fact that the harm to trust is significant is unfair, and that it demands a termination is unfortunate, because the termination is a significant harm. But the reality is, the damage to trust is also a significant harm and the only mechanism available to reliably remediate the damage is termination.

 

[Resistance]

You don't seem to know what the term "AI slop" means, based on your usage of it here. AI slop means "content generated by AI with no effort that is intended to attract views or generate a profit with minimal input". It does not mean "using multiple AI tools to extract verbatim text from a piece of writing" to use as quotes in an article for publication. What Benj did was a poor choice, and a misuse of AI tools that resulted in him failing to comply with Ars editorial standards, but it's dishonest to call what he did or the article that was retracted as "AI slop". Talk about unprofessional.

For my definition of AI slop, intent is irrelevant, it's the tools used to produce the product (AI) and the quality of the final product (slop(py)) that matters.

 

[Resistance]

Neither one of this questions is unanswered, FYI. We know the answer to both:

1. The fake text made it into the article because Benj told an AI tool to present salient parts of the article verbatim to him and it did not do that despite advertising that it could; being Benj' first use of the tool, he (wrongly) trusted it to do as it advertised and did not verify the quotes.
2. The quotes in question were not particularly substantive to the article, nor did they impact the character of the subject/author of said 'quotes'. That part, on top of the bed of historic trust/body of work from Benj in the past, led the co-author and/or editor (I don't know how many people reviewed the work before publication) to not go back and verify the quotes for authenticity.

I guess you are not familiar with the concept of unpaid leave? It's a real, painful consequence which takes up most of the huge amount of space between "do nothing" and "fire him".

Unpaid leave will not reliably remediate the damage. Edit: to expand, it will remediate some of the damage, but for many that action will be insufficient to restore trust.

 

[Resistance]

Judging from his statement, copy/pasting text out of ChatGPT and into Ars articles seems to be a regular occurrence. Benj seems not at all concerned about the practice itself, just that it resulted in fictitious quotes. Hey Ken, who else on your payroll is pasting text from LLMs into articles? Is it everyone?

I get the downvotes because to many people here, that's probably an absurd question. Thing is, it's not an absurd question to everyone, and many would be well within their rights to ask it. Another question some might ask: do confidential sources have information they provide put into ChatGPT? Part of the way to address these concerns is through decisive action.

 

[Resistance]

No, you're right, and I'm an American saying this: knee-jerk responses are part of our heritage and rights!

Seriously, over 900 comments? I cannot say that I've EVER seen that many for any story. And yeah, I've been here awhile. This is what we've got for entertainment now, evidently. We can't let anything simmer anymore, it's all full-boil pessimism in this country, 24/7/365. Let the damn company figure out what is going on! My bet, and this was said earlier, is that they did not have a good SOP for this type of problem, and pulled the article as a stop-gap measure. I do hope Ars reposts the original unredacted, along with a proper "Story Update" at the top of the article as they've done in the past when something changes that affects how the article reads. But I don't need it THIS FRACKING MINUTE. Get the facts straight first.

I am in a position in tech where my clients are all clamoring for ALL AI ALL THE TIME NOW NOW NOW. I have to be the adult voice in the crowd asking to simply slow down. This technology is being driven so hard right now that I can't even keep up some days! And we all know what happens when we can't keep up... tools like AI get made! But it is not, in no uncertain terms, going away. Feel how you will about that, but that's the honest truth. Power has come to the uninitiated and the overworked, and they like it. It's an "equalizer" for better or worse. How people use it is what it will become. If companies would take a few beats to teach people ways to use the technology in a safe and sane fashion, we'd be better off, but time waits for no robot chat session.

Finally, Benj... damn dude, I understand it was a seemingly innocent slip, but with great power... I do not want to see you thrown to the wolves, but I also need to see something more than 'mea culpa' after this. I want to see the full, unadulterated behind-the-scenes breakdown of what went wrong and where; I'd like that to be written by Benj. I also want to see Ars stand behind their employees and give this person a second chance. I want to see others learn from his mistake(s). I want to see other publishers learn from ARS' mistakes as well!

But mostly? I want us all to learn that no man is perfect, no AI is perfect, let Ars and the community we have here accept this and let the team move on with real reporting. Please.

I got you: 86 thousand and counting.

 

[Resistance]

Even with that somewhat wrong definition, the article wasn't AI slop. Everything in the article was written by humans, except the quotes, and as I recall only the quotes in the latter part of the article will AI hallucinations.

If people call it ai slop then it meets the definition of ai slop, that's how definitions work.

 

[Resistance]

I mean sure, literally also means figuratively if you want to go down that route. The English language is a living one, but one can't just use blatantly misuse extremely heavily-used words with well-defined meanings in a novel, lying way and then not except to be called out about it.

Sure but that's not what happened here. There is nothing novel or deceptive about calling an article that contains sloppy ai generated content, ai slop.

 

[Resistance]

I disagree, but you do you.

So you don't believe that there is anyone who won't have their trust in ars fully restored as a result of Edwards being put on unpaid leave?

 

[Resistance]

Sure but that's not what happened here. There is nothing novel or deceptive about calling an article that contains sloppy ai generated content, ai slop.

To expand, it would be reasonable for you to claim it is hyperbole, heck I might even agree with you.

 

[Resistance]

No, I don't think it's reasonable to expect any action will placate everyone here. Clearly, some people who are not invested in the situation at all beyond anonymous commentary won't be happy until the authors of the retracted piece are jobless and blackballed from the entire industry, so I definitely believe and acknowledge they won't be happy with Benj being put on unpaid leave. I was speaking on my opinion, which is that unpaid leave would be more than enough to satisfy my concerns of adequate punishment and 'restore' faith in Ars, such as it is needed. I also think any reasonable person would agree that that is sufficient in terms of "should we abandon Ars wholesale".

Other viewpoints obviously exist, but I don't think Ars need concern themselves with that group; certainly anyone calling for an author's head or bemoaning the death of an entire publication after what appears to be a first-time mistake, followed by a full retraction by Ars merely 2 hours later, without having access to all the relevant information (or, in many cases here, straight up ignoring the facts of the situation they are privy to) is definitely not to be heeded.

I am reserving my own final judgment until we know more or at least until Ars has had more time to investigate and publish a follow-up statement or article on what happened in more detail, but things would have to sway in a very unexpected direction at this point for me to take such issue with Ars or Benj that I cancel my subscription or stop reading them altogether. I will likely still subscribe to Ars regardless of whether Benj remains on their payroll, given the facts that the public is currently privy to.

Edit - correct one instance of 'paid leave' to 'unpaid leave'. Oops.

If you want people to interpret what you write as what you mean then you should write what you mean.

So ars should only concern themselves with viewpoints that are the same as yours, got it.