Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

See full article...

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I saw it in my own Mastodon feed from the arstechnica flipboard account. Didn't see it in the mastodon.social feed. I'm honestly not sure if Ars even runs the "arstechnica" profile on flipboard, but it looks official, so maybe that's what you remember popping up in your feed?

I hope so, anyway. Although either way... The retraction really ought to be going out on social media feeds just like any other article does.

I saw it on Mastodon but only from other accounts linking to the article. I follow the Ars account feed and it never showed up there.

I know from a little dustup a while ago that they've never automated the Mastodon feed, so that's either a deliberate choice or an oversight. Either way it seems bad to me since, regardless of what Ars staff believes, they get a lot of attention on parts of Mastodon other than the .social firehose that obscures everything else if that's the lens you see things through. I think it was an infosec researcher whose post first alerted me to the original article. Those are the kinds of people who'll notice when they don't bother posting the retraction.

EDITS: Missed a couple words.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I have (thankfully?) been terminated twice under such vague and mysterious circumstances that I genuinely could not explain my termination.

I can relate. I once was fired by Microsoft, but laid off by the contracting company I was working for. They knew the firing was just more stupid MSFT politics so they made sure I was eligible for unemployment until I got the next gig. Try explaining that on a resume.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

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

Some journalists that are using AI:
(snip)

"Using AI" and "not verifying the accuracy of the output of the AI that is appearing under your byline" are not equivalent. Personally I've chosen not to engage in the former because, as someone else said above, the first hit is free. Once you've crossed that line keeping your footing solid while standing on the slope on the other side takes a lot more discipline than most humans have.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Hypothetically, you could use an LLM to create a software tool that downloads the content of a webpage, identifies the quote marks, and copies the text between them. That would not be subject to hallucination.

The only thing that's hypothetical about that is using an LLM to do it. I could write this in either JavaScript or PHP using RegEx to match patterns with a very high degree of accuracy and my degrees are in Communications, not Computer Science.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

So the only use I've had for it along these lines is using it to find primary sources because Google has become so degraded as a search engine as to be useless. Would rather use a search engine but most either rely on Google's useless index or have their own useless index.

You just made me realize how much DuckDuckGo's AI identifying the sources it uses has been becoming part of how I search. At first I ignored it, but now I fairly often glance at it and then click the link it gives to the sources it used. It saves me the trouble of scrolling through all the crappy AI-generated clickbait sites in the actual search results to find those sources.

And you also made me think about web directories for the first time in a long time. Being a human-maintained directory was what made Yahoo! so useful back when it was useful, but obviously that's not practical with the web at its current scale. But what if DMOZ was revived and AI was used to categorize web content according to its hierarchy? There still would be a lot of AI noise polluting the findability signal but it would be interesting to see if going back to the directory approach might be helpful. Of course, AOL and Yahoo! being the longsighted geniuses they are the original DMOZ project page is long gone and even the unofficial mirror is only available on Archive.org now.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

IMO, Ars needs to take a deep look at itself. BIG "if" here, because I don't know what the actual scenario is, but it's plausible that the below is similar to what might have happened:

If Benj felt so pressured to push out an article quickly, despite being sick, then the fault is not just on Benj for writing it, nor just the editors who didn't review it, but also on Ars' management/ownership. Only in the US (among supposed first-world countries) would such a scenario be even remotely normalized, and even then, it would plainly be the wrong way to do things. A culture where an employee doesn't feel they can call off when sick means that the employees are not secure, they're not safe, and they feel they have to choose their job over their health. It doesn't matter if you have FMLA days left or sick days accrued if you feel that you'll be punished in some way for using those "benefits," or that you have to work through sickness to "keep up" at work.

Now, there are many other things that could have happened. Hell, Benj could even be making up the illness after the fact. But there is something concerning in this entire chain of events that suggests something is deeply wrong.

The double byline on the story makes me think Benj probably was online while sick, which is not something I would say is inherently wrong, and saw the legitimately interesting emerging story. So then he asked a colleague to help write it.

It's somewhat analogous to the time, many years ago when I still committed acts of journalism, when one of my colleagues had a broken arm and couldn't type with two hands. But honestly, writing is the easy part. Knowing what to write about is the real work.

So for a few weeks he'd identify a story then use his good hand to cut and paste from sources and send them to me. I'd write the articles and send them back for his thumb up. A couple times when he wanted direct quotes he made phone calls and sent me the recordings with in and out times. I can't remember now how we bylined those stories. It would have been fair to split them but I wasn't too hung up on getting credit so I might have accepted being a ghost. I can't remember now.

Anyway, my point is that while if the covid story is true it would have been perfectly fine for Benj to not do anything with the story, I get that with the web at our fingertips the dividing line between what we browse out of personal interest and what we browse for work is nearly nonexistent. So identifying a story worth covering while sick isn't a huge red flag for me. But FFS once a colleague is roped in to do the actual writing, give them all the sources and have them write it. If you're too sick to write then you're too sick to write.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Be careful with using AI summaries for scientific topics. Within my subject area, the AI summary frequently presents some entirely nothing paper from a vanishingly obscure journal instead of the most important / best studies. These summaries also make up facts by combining sentence fragments from their “sources” in a stochastically plausible manner.

Which is not to say that SEO didn’t already do something pretty similar back in the Age of Search. I’m guessing the search companies weighted the models for their own, terrible, SEO algorithms.

If anything you’re better off asking chatGPT. There’s a (slightly) better chance that an actual human might have reviewed the outputs at some point.

I probably didn't make myself clear, but what I was trying to say is that I don't accept the AI summary at face value but click the link it provides to the source(s) it cribbed from. I don't know if Google provides those because I rarely use Google anymore.

It's very similar to how I use Wikipedia for research; I read, or skim, the article and then follow the links to sources for the bits that interest me both to get more information and to confirm that what I just read is an accurate representation of it. If it's anything remotely important I don't just believe AI or Wikipedians without checking their sources.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

That would be bad. I still don't think that's a fair analogy.

To stay with the car analogy: he made a huge scratch on the front door. It's ugly and totally unprofessional. But he then apologized profusely, took full responsibility, and told me he will do whatever he can to fix it.

So, to be clear: nobody got permanently hurt, and he wants to fix it.

As I find it rare for people to own their mistakes, and as there is no pattern of this being a systematic problem, I am leaning heavily towards forgiveness.

You can call me a shitty leader if you like, but I treat my team the same way. The result: they're HIGHLY productive, NEVER afraid to own up to their mistakes, and we have a healthy culture where discussing f*ckups and fixes is never toxic or dangerous. That goes for me to: I am secure enough in my leadership position to share my own f*ckups with them on equal terms. In leadership terms, this is called "psychological safety," and it's the means to make high-performers stick with their job for a very, very long time.

Okay, I've been staying out of it but your last paragraph made me think about how that describes exactly how I managed teams too. But where you lose me is that there's a big difference between doing a dumb and blatantly subverting stated policies and procedures.

Forget all the bad car analogies, let's look at this like it was code. Effectively what happened is a developer asked an LLM to write a new function for them on their local machine and then they pushed it directly to Production without running it through Dev, Staging, or QA review. That kind of thing is more than an oopsie.

I say that as someone who once crashed a big ecommerce site by pushing out a small change that required rebuilding the cache of every single URL during the peak load for the year. It was my error and I owned it, but I didn't make that change during a code freeze period without first making my case for why it was necessary and getting approval from everyone else responsible for site stability. It was my fuck up even though in the end it turned out the documentation we all relied on was incorrect and that's why the site crashed. I was forgiven but if I'd just shoved that out all on my own without following procedures, looping in others, and getting the change approved then I damn well should have been fired.


_{(For those keeping score, yes I actually have been both a professional writer and a manager of front-end web dev. And other things too. "Specialization is for insects" pretty much defines my career.)}

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Maybe I’m naive, but I feel a joint byline is like jointly signing a mortgage. Both are willingly responsible, and if things go sideways, it’s on both of parties. We give a lot of responsibility to journalists in exchange for higher expectations.

You know how sometimes one person on a mortgage ends up suing the other person on a mortgage? That's an outcome of trust being violated. Taking joint responsibility for the mortgage means if the other person bails on you, yes you are still responsible for making payments but they can and should be held culpable for the financial and reputational damage they have done to you by violating your trust.

All a shared byline means is "I did some work on this and so did they." The byline doesn't say it, but if one person pitches the story and provides background information to the other person then they are more responsible. It's like if two people jointly sign the mortgage paperwork but the one with the higher credit score also co-signs as a guarantor.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

May I suggest a qualifier? An excuse is something that makes something seem okay, but may or may not represent reasonable justification for the choice made.

I might be spliitting semantic hairs but I think there's a big difference between making an excuse and having an excuse. We're in a linguistic period where the word "excuse" is more often used in the former sense of trying to deflect blame, but we do still use it in the latter sense of agreeing there are mitigating circumstances.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I don't know the answer. But speaking as a professional editor, I can say that verifying sources is something we really don't want to do or have time to do. We really need to depend on our writers to provide us with good sources, correctly quoted and properly cited.

Of course, "verifying sources" can be more, or less, rigorous; and sometimes rigorous verification of sources, especially in book manuscripts citing other books, isn't realistically possible given time and budget constraints.

However, if sources are to be verified by an editor, then the kind of editor normally tasked with such verification would be a copyeditor. (And most copyeditors I know are already overworked.)

Edit: spelling

I think a lot of people don't understand how much of an outlier The New Yorker's editorial process is. I consider myself lucky that I ever had a job where what I wrote was looked over by a copy editor. A fact checker would have been a total fantasy.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

The problem with this analogy is that apparently the system in place allowed the code to go straight to production without anyone in Dev, Staging or QA review it. Yeah, the bad code is a problem, but so is the system that allowed it to production without more than a cursory glance.

I don't know about you, but if my QA lead found me running a process that allowed straight to production, I'd be smothered in honey and staked out on an anthill.

Every place where I had the power to push to prod I could have easily done it without going through any intermediary steps. Not the best practice, but this was consistent from small non-profits to one of the largest market cap companies in the world.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

But you knew better.

Um... tell us you knew better?

I, uh, did know better. Although I am pretty sure at one job we may have jointly agreed to push a critical, but low-risk, fix straight to prod. That would have been 20ish years ago and things get fuzzy.

It wasn't the one I brought the site down with because we ran that through Dev and Staging to make sure it wasn't going to bring the site down. Then it brought the site down because a guy who had just left the company either wrote bad documentation or completely changed which server a particularly resource-heavy script ran on without updating the documentation. If he hadn't already left he might well have been fired for that.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Perhaps the lurker has been debating whether this bloodthirsty community is one he wants to pay to join?

I'm kind of feeling the other way personally. I lurked for a long time in part because it was clear if I commented I'd occasionally get my ass handed to me on a plate, and since de-lurking that has definitely happened.

Sometimes I deserved it, sometimes I thought the hander was avoiding examining their own assumptions and biases. But either way I've been feeling that like John Cleese I probably should be paying for the argument and honestly what I'm getting out of the comments on this story just makes me feel even more that way.

The last few years brought way too much change to my life and I've been running on a very lean budget but I'm starting to have income again and it might be time to pony up for Ars. Maybe less because of the quality of the writing than because of the quality of discussion that comes out of the writing. If "subscriptor" finally appears under my name it is in no way to be taken as an endorsement of the way this brouhaha has been handled, or the lapses that allowed it to happen in the first place.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Two tips people may or may not know:

1) If you click on the little meeple icon on people's posts it will show you everything they posted in a thread

View attachment 128410

2) When we eject people there now a notice on their post, and it remains even after the eject expires. It will explain the reason, the length etc (this is why the tool tip thing on mobile isn't really an issue for ejects, there's always a clearly visible message on the actual post itself with any browser)

For convenience here is that post, and the explanation I left:

View attachment 128409

For clarity moving forward, can you confirm this was because the quote was replaced by commentary and not because it was simply modified? When responding to a point made in a 500 word post, snipping out 470 words to leave just the 30 words needed to contextualize the response is okay?

I ask because I see it done and have done it myself but reading the posting guidelines I see no such loophole. "Moderator discretion" is an acceptable answer.

EDIT: Oops. I had drafted a response to something else then decided not to post it. But it must have been stored in local data because when I did post the response above it was magically prepended to it. I just removed it. Hate it when that happens.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I came here to post something similar. I've seen other threads where folks will snip, even summarize the responses of another with [clearly edited] brackets. I don't actually see a problem with this, and have definitely seen it not punished before.

I would suggest treading carefully as a mod. I don't think that suddenly applying the "letter of the law" is the best move here. Spirit is probably a better call given the totality of the circumstances.

Unrelated, but I'd also agree with some of the others in here that Ars has, over a decade+, slipped into very low value "reporting." You know, the very stuff that AI gets like 80%+ of the value from at a fraction of the cost. I'd personally be a lot happier if Ars went back to a model of "artisanal" reporting, with only highly in-depth, well-researched articles published. The organization would be a lot less likely to have this happen again, without the overhead of editors suddenly needing to double/triple their time reviewing an article before publication.

Just some free, unsolicited advice from a roughly 20 year reader. Hope you get your money's worth!

If you wouldn't mind deleting the first paragraph in what you quoted from me, which I had not actually intended to post, I'd appreciate it. I don't know if it's just a Firefox thing but the text box on Ars forums can hold on to stuff that I've manually removed sometimes and that's what happened here.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

The rule is to not modify people's words to things they didn't say. What's in the quote box should be words they typed.

It's fine to take a section of someone's long post and reply to just the relevant part, provided you don't do it some malicious way. Selectively quoting just part of a sentence to change the meaning to be cute or whatever. Basic common sense applies in other words.

Otherwise that's totally fine.

The rule exists for a bunch of reasons, but there are two primary things at play here:

1) If you are replying to a post people should be able to see what you're replying to. It's basic courtesy if nothing else

2) Even when the modification is supposed to be funny and not malicious we can't play the game of deciding when it's okay or not. It's a blanket rule, and once we start adding exceptions it just turns into a game of whack-a-mole

Fair enough. Ironically I just arguably violated the rule even though I had thought better of posting what I wrote but my browser didn't respect me deleting it from the text box. It happens sometimes, probably due to how the multi-quote script works.

ETA: Ah, thanks for the explanation.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I can't believe that what actually led me to subscribe was a comments section devolving into people arguing about the precise technical definition of "AI slop." I hope I don't end up regretting this.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Nearly the entirety of this thread has been emotional. Anger at how Ars has handled the retraction. Expressions of feeling "betrayed" by being fed misinformation. And most disturbingly, in my opinion, calling for the summary dismissal of an employee without a complete and thorough investigation.

This thread has become a horde of villagers with pitchforks standing outside of Frankenstein's castle, with a small contingent of other villagers at the gate saying "well, let's just wait a moment and evaluate this."

While I don't think this was directed at me specifically, I always find it interesting when people on the internet tell me that the fact I have a different opinion from them is solely because I'm emotionally upset, angry, or whatever when I'm actually feeling quite calm and composed. It may actually be the closest I'll ever come to knowing what my life would have been like if I'd been born into this society as a woman.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

No, it was not directed at you specifically. I'm not sure I've read your previous comment(s). My only point was that this is a very emotionally charged thread. And certain allowance might need to be made to accommodate that.

I'd just like folks to step back for a moment and consider some different perspectives.

What I was reacting to was your characterization of "nearly this entire thread" as emotional. While I've certainly seen some over the top appeals to emotion I wouldn't say that they dominate the discussion. I've read, I believe, every comment and if you aren't sure you've read my earlier ones that suggests to me that maybe any statement about the emotional tone of the entire thread might not be as objective and dispassionate as you think.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

If you feel I in any way discounted your comments, I apologize. It was not intended.

It's not about me. I feel you've discounted the actual level of discourse of nearly everyone else.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Every time I search for technical information, only to find a mess of auto-generated, referral-link infested slop promoted via SEO, I keep thinking of how a modern web directory could help - even if it only covered a small proportion of sites.

Ultimately, when looking for information, the best option is to go straight to a website that is likely to have the information to begin with. Astronomy gear? Skip the horrendously-incorrect slop sites full of random referral links and go straight to Cloudy Nights or Astrobin. Computer gear? Skip the search engine and look to see if Ars or TechPowerup has a review. Search is rapidly becoming worthless, and we need to fall back on trusting individual sites.

But how to know which sites even cover a topic to begin with? It used to be that you just went to Yahoo Directory or DMOZ to find websites on a particular topic. These days, you need to stumble across them. Returning to a directory-based approach could help with discovery.

But there would need to be some way to keep the slop factories out. If the directory was fully open and they could just spam their multitude of identikit sites in to every category, that would kill the directory as quickly as they killed web search.

Even better would be some kind of carefully-curated list ranked by reputation (as assessed by experts in the field). But getting experts to even agree in the first place would be a challenge.

It's an interesting thought, isn't it? Now I'm remembering a semi-serious/semi-joking paper I wrote in 2008 for an algorithmically generated evaluation system for determining the trustworthiness of social media accounts. I'm not a CS person but I knew there wasn't a good way to do it then and I mostly was trying to show original thinking for the class I was taking. Now I'm like, "Hmm. Something like that could probably be done with AI (or 'AI') to evaluate, categorize, and assign trustworthiness scores to sites in a web directory."

Start working on it now and be ready in the wing when tulip AI mania finishes running its course...

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Does intent matter in this situation? There are lots of accusations of "forging," "fabricating," "lying," and so on throughout these comments, and every single one of those requires intent to deceive. To whit, from the macOS dictionary:



I don't believe it's likely that Mr. Edwards intended to quote the subject of his article incorrectly, therefore I don't think those adjectives accurately convey the situation.

So back to intent - does it matter? My initial reaction is that it should matter, but I'm open to other thoughts on the matter.

There's another definition of "fabricate" which is entirely devoid of intent. And he used a piece of software which fabricated quotes in that sense of the verb.

But you are right to focus on the word "intent."

Then he submitted them as his own work with the strong implication that he retrieved them from the blog post himself and had verified they were correct. That later part seems to me to fall on the wrong side of the "intent" test, although it probably also can't be properly called "fabrication" or "forgery." Perhaps by not disclosing the source and presenting it as his own work it could be a "lie of ommission" though.

The AI fabricated. The AI forged. The writer intended to take the credit for what it produced. With credit comes responsibility.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Here's a hilarious version from the person doing the digging: https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/116065540537300456

Okay, so the new twist in the story of the human taking credit for a bot's bad work is that the whole thing was kicked off by another human pretending to be a bot upset that its bad work was called out? Have I got that right?

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I don't think this way of looking at it improves Benj's position, what if AI meant Actually Indians? I passed my work to them and slapped by name on the result, I just didn't verify their work properly. But you're the whole source of the problem to begin with, there's no way AI slop ends up in the article without you handing the reins to AI, even when there was an explicit policy not to. Stealthily outsourcing your work should be at least as big a no-no as making shit up yourself.

Exactly my point.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

The “AI is just a tool” posters won’t like this, but there are already early studies showing the ability of people to do tasks declines remarkably quickly once they start outsourcing those tasks to AI. A writer who uses AI as a tool will find it harder to write and is therefore more likely to turn to AI again.

Granted, this is a new variation on Socrates’ dislike of writing as a tool for outsourcing memory that was making the youth soft-headed imbeciles, but the thing is he was absolutely correct in his analysis. In the long run, transitioning from an oral society to a literate society brought many benefits that outweighed the decline in memorization skills. Maybe I’m just a cranky graybeard like Socrates but I have yet to see any silver lining around taking the next step and outsourcing the actual literate act to a tool.

And somewhat as an aside, having been lucky enough to experience COVID brain fog for only 18 months after my first infection I found it very, very similar to the feeling of burnout brain fog from hyperfocusing on a mental task for too long without taking breaks to replenish the dopamine supply. Writing for me is a creative act that, when it’s going well, fills the dopamine tank as I do it. The idea of a writer outsourcing the act of writing seems like too slippery of a slope to even stand at the top of and, while I can’t know anyone else’s experience, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference between brain fog from illness and cognitive atrophy from lack of use.

I suppose I should do a little legwork myself and cite some sources for those studies about AI and cognitive decline. Hey DuckDuckGo, does AI use cause cognitive decline?

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I let out a pretty depressing chuckle anytime I hear the bathroom argument. The only trans person I know personally is a trans man. He has a shaved head and a big, burly beard. If he went into "the right" restroom, these people would have a fit.

The expected transgressive thrill of going into the girls' bathroom was such a letdown when I did it in third grade that I really can't understand the total failure of imagination involved in thinking it's the best answer to the question "If I was me but I looked like a woman, what would I do that I can't do now?" There definitely has to be more to the psychology going on there.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

i actually have a question about this. earlier someone mentioned not wanting to use "PTO" to cover sick days. i thought this was just a terminology difference, but is it actually the case that in the US, you have to use vacation days to get paid sick leave? or is this something that varies by state? (in which case how does it work in NY, where i think Ars is based?)

It varies not just by state but by company. I've worked at places that allotted a certain number of vacation days and a certain number of sick days. But by the late '90s the definite trend was to lump them together into one bank of Personal Time Off days. Obviously this incentivizes not taking sick days so that you'll have that time available as vacation days. My wife is currently in a situation where because basically any day that she answers an email counts as a work day (which is very much not true at many companies) she's taking every other Friday off for a few months so that she doesn't hit the limit of PTO she can accrue.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

It cannot “help track down quotes” without creating content. Selecting the quotes you want to use IS AUTHORSHIP. If I cite a case and want a quote from it, selecting which quotation best benefits my argumen is part of my specialized skillset. That quote is part of the brief I turn in or what I say at oral argument. M It is, while a quote, also a fundamental piece of MY content. I stake my credibility to what I turn in, including the portions I choose to quote.

If you ask a search engine to help you track down a quote, you know that it's going to show you what it finds. If you ask AI software to act as a search engine and help you track down a quote, you don't know for sure that it's going to show you what it finds or if it's going to try to please you by making up something that sounds like it could be something it finds.

Either way I don't have an issue with using a tool to track down a quote, but I do think using AI to do it should come with the expectation that you are going to do so much work on your part to confirm that the quote is in fact real that by the time you are done you have taken 100% ownership of the content you are putting under your name. And at that point I think it's passed beyond the intent of the policy, if not the letter and shouldn't be an issue. I'm saying this as someone who is very much an AI skeptic and wouldn't use one for paid work at all.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Now that the conversation has shifted to who's using which bathrooms and who's posting too much, it's probably time to close this thread.

Thank you for introducing this topic. I look forward to the discussion it will engender.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Can't really trust search engines anymore as they're getting increasingly tied with AI...

At least with the ones I use if I ask them to track down a quote they are going to present me with a list of links to pages that already exist and which match to some degree the criteria I asked them to search for. Now, those pages may be infested with AI garbage but if I'm only looking at search results and not the clearly identified text generated by the search engine's own integrated AI, the problem you cite isn't an issue.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Confusingly, Copilot has now gained a Search mode which does focus on giving you the citations. At the moment that is separate to Bing Search and, unfortunately, it is vastly better than keyword search in the case where you would otherwise have semantic difficulties, like searching for stuff about the band "The The."

But it's quite possible that once Microsoft have kicked that around a bit they'll put it behind Bing by default, and then you will indeed be using that engine whenever you just use Bing.

(The only thing that can save us here is that no-one uses Bing.)

The only time I even think about Bing is when I remember reading when it was launched that they intended it to become a verb the same way "Google" had. I immediately saw the problem with that is that for any native English speaker the natural past tense of "Google" is "Googled" but the past tense of "Bing" is "Bung." Picking that name was another classic Ballmerian bungle.

_{EDIT: Yes, I know it's more like the past participle than the past tense ("I have rung" vs "I rang") but it's still where the mind goes.}

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

DDG users may now shift uncomfortably in their (our) seats...

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I'm just curious, what type of AI related articles would Ars members want to read?

The snarky reply that popped into my head was "Ones written by Molly White," but honestly that's not far from the truth. I value distanced skepticism over cozy access, and I am far more interested in the broader societal effects of any technology than the touted benefits of it in specific uses.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

In terms of Mr. Edwards putting Ars Technica at risk of libel suits (or whatever I am reading in every third post) ... that is ridiculous at least in terms of USA laws.

While I haven't said anything at all about libel, it isn't a "ridiculous" concern at all. If a plaintiff can convincingly demonstrate they suffered reputational harm as a result of untrue published information, they win a libel suit. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the falsehood was written by a human or generated by software, it's still the publisher that bears the risk. The only justification I can see for claiming it's ridiculous is if someone felt AI was incapable of error.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Under U.S. law, a statement has to be shown to have been knowingly false at the time it was made. If the person posting the AI slop believed it to be true at the time of publication, that's all that's needed as a defense.

No, there's more nuance to it than that.

IANAL, but I have taken media law classes and have had to run things through legal counsel for risk assessment before publishing. If you are a lawyer and what I'm about to say is way off-base I welcome correction.

Regardless of academic and professional experience, I had a pretty big "a-ha" moment about libel many years ago when a person in the city where I lived died and news reports of his death described him as "mafia-associated." When he was alive he was merely "alleged to have ties to organized crime." Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew he was working with the mafia but because that fact had not been proven in court no publisher would risk dropping the "allegedly" dodge to protect themselves from a libel suit. But a dead person can't be libeled so when he died they stated the truth.

So no. If what you assert were true they would have just said it outright when he was alive because they believed it. But if the plaintiff can convince a jury that a publisher does not not have reasonable proof something is true, then the plaintiff wins. In this case the feds had tried and failed to prove the connection in court, so he got to be an alleged mobster until the day he died. It didn't matter what the publishers believed.

People get this stuff wrong all the time, and publishers get sued for it. The smart ones will have even less trust that AI can get it right.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

You are either not a parent, or someone who should be watched carefullly.

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.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

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.

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.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

When I hear the phrase "sex tourism" used, it's more frequently applied to Thailand, the Philippines, and Russia.

It's a ridiculously loaded thing to talk about on the internet, as the reply from the poster who first brought it up and is now insinuating that my objection to "if A, then B" assumptions about people suggests I have something to hide shows. But that said the first place that pops into my mind when I hear the term is Amsterdam. And just to reiterate what I said before about myself no, I've never been to Amsterdam. I lead a pretty dull life and that's okay with me.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

I have. No hanky panky, though, just delivering a talk, visiting a tea shop and a bunch of museums. The Netherlands is pretty lovely!

I'd love to go someday.

The closest I've ever come to the topic at hand was when I was killing a couple hours wandering in Helsinki before going to the airport. I came across a storefront with curtained windows and the universal sign for "cup of coffee" in one of them. The Finnish sign might as well be Greek to me so I opened the door expecting to find a coffee shop. Instead I found racks of pornographic magazines and four or five men standing around, each with one open in their hands. Their heads turned as one to look at me, as did the man at the counter. I backed out and decided it was time to head back to the hotel.