Is it “plagiarism” to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren’t taken, but plagiarism doesn’t seem like the right word, as quotes are almost definitionally not plagiarism. But maybe these were paraphrasings masquerading as quotes, so maybe that’s the difference.
Yeah, it's the lack of attribution that is key, even if it sounds like a trivial and ceremonial step. If a New York Times reporter writes "'Our investigation has completely stalled,' Kings County Sheriff Bob Jones told the Springfield Observer", I can infer that the NYT is reliant on local reporting for this story and may not have done original on-the-ground work themselves.
Imagine how flimsy Ars' story about a blog post would look like if the story had correctly attributed the quotes (fabricated or not) to, "according to Claude AI's analysis of the blog post". The reader would have the right to wonder if the reporter had even read the blog post.
Plagiarism hurts not only the original author (in this case, I don't think we have to worry about the LLM), but also the reporter's audience, who has an expectation that the writer's reporting and analysis are original and based on the writer's own research and observations. At the very least it's a theft of the reader's time, if I wanted an LLM's perspective on a topic, I'd generate it myself
One of the things left unsaid in Edwards's apology [0] was whether he read the blog post that is the entire raison d'etre of his story. It's not like the story purported to do anything other than incorporate publish blog posts. So in his overworked and sickened state, how did trying out an "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool" substantially save him time versus jotting notes while ostensibly reading the source material himself
"Slop" and "hallucinate" have meanings outside of AI too, but it's easier to repurpose existing words than come up with a whole new lexicon for AI failure modes.
I literally discovered Ghostty yesterday when googling "best terminal macos" and surfaced a ~year-old reddit thread recommending it [0]. Just needed something other than Terminal so I could Cmd-Tab between distinct command-line work (e.g. claude code and ipython tabs). Was nice to find something that just worked
This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis.
This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.
> the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.
I don't give a fuck who gets fired when I have been publicly defamed. I care about being compensated for damages caused to me. If a tow truck company backed into my house I would be much less concerned about the internal workings of some random tow truck company than I would be ensuring my house was repaired.
Yeah, I have been extremely pro-AI and have been for decades, and I use LLMs daily, but this is not an acceptable use of an LLM. Especially since it's fabricating quotes, so there's the plagiarism issue and then the veracity issue. And it's doing this to report on an incident of someone being bizarrely accosted by LLMs. Just such a ridiculous situation all around.
Absolutely inevitable if you condone using GAI to ‘assist’ in writing. The inevitable outcome is reporters just writing prompts and giving it a quick once over, then skipping the last step because they believe the companies selling generative AI and/or are under time pressure and it seems good enough.
They are word generators. That is their function, so if you use them words will be generated that are not yours and which are sometimes nonsense and made up.
The problem here was not plagiarism but generated falsehoods.
I thought it was very obvious AI is doing almost everything of most of the news outlets these days. Especially the ones that only ever had an online presence.
Not just the reporter, anyone who had eyes on it before it was published. And whoever is responsible for setting the culture that allowed this to happen.
That makes much more sense tbh. I believe Musk predicted in 2021 that we would land humans on the moon by 2024 [0]. That obviously has been deprioritized but how many Starships have delivered 50+ tons of payload to the moon so far?
How many times do you believe immigration agents showed up door to door with riot gear and rifles back then? When it was caught on camera during the Clinton administration it was one of the most polarizing images of his presidency
That one was controversial not because it was the deportation of an illegal alien rather there were custody issues (abduction accusations) as well as the complication of persecution in the home country —in other words there were multiple issues complicating the deportation. Was he a political prisoner, was he abducted to the US?
When the Miami Herald won 2 Pulitzers for its coverage of the incident, do you think it was because people were highly interested in the international custody issues? I’d argue that people were more piqued at why 100+ armed immigration agents needed to raid a family’s home
In a free country, if people think the president is crummy, they are supposed to be able to say they want the president to resign or be removed. In the USA this is by design and has been provided for in advance intentionally since the beginning.
Without fear of retribution, this is the USA remember.
While protesting or not.
Whether for or against the President or not.
Retribution is really bad but fear alone is pretty bad too, it can be a complete terror as we have seen in some countries sometimes, where dictatorship rises it always leads to terrible shithole outcomes. Even when they don't employ storm troopers. But there's no other way to be more communist than having a dictator of any kind, no matter what they call it.
Thinking about pure terror, how do you think terrorists got their name?
Storm trooper tactics have always struck terror too, that's their job.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, the USA is supposed to be more free than anywhere else.
As we have seen, not every President or administration official can perform in that league.
From the very point that 4 protestors were killed, Nixon was actually toast.
He just wasn't burnt to a crisp until after he was re-elected.
What were people thinking? Nobody would admit to voting for him a second time after he was proven dishonest though.
Of course equally stupid things have happened which are getting plain to see for more people all the time.
The Dept of Homeland Security has had its own internal gen-AI chat bot since before Trump took office [0]. That this guy couldn’t make do with that, and didn’t think through the repercussions of uploading non-public documents to a public chatbot doesn’t bode well for his ability to manage CISA
You condition your take with “I’m not talking about deepfakes of real people”, but why do you think it is that Grok offers users the ability to generate pornographic imagery of entirely fake digital people — even tailoring them to be as visually flawless as one could desire — and yet so many users end up using it to generate deepfake porn of real people?
So with that in mind, why should we assume that the unrestricted proliferation of fake child porn would not produce significant harm downstream to society? Is the assumption that unlimited fake child porn would satiate the kind of people who now seek out real child porn?
Yes thank you! I find I get more than enough done (and more than enough code to review) by prompting the agent step by step. I want to see what kind of projects are getting done with multiple async autonomous agents. Was hoping to find youtube videos of someone setting up a project for multiple agents so I could see the cadence of the human stepping in and making directions
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