Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
arstechnica.com
We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.
  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    01·
    2 months ago

    Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you’re paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.

    • Totally Human Emdash User@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right… but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this. Now, arguably he should have taken sick time off instead of trying to work through it (as he admits), but this would have cost him vacation time, and the fact that he even was forced into making this choice is a systemic problem that is not being sufficiently acknowledged.

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        he had COVID while doing all this

        I’ve had COVID before, it sucks but it doesn’t make you stupid.

        he just got mixed up when experimenting

        I don’t believe him.

          • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Because it’s completely ridiculous. What if we was just phoning it in? He’s just going to come out and say it?

              • LadyMeow@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                1·
                2 months ago

                I mean, I find it hard to believe too.

                accidentally used a Chat-GPT paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s blog rather than a direct quote.

                Is quite the umm…. Accident? So the ars writer pulled some junk from ChatGPT, and used it as a direct quote in the article by accident? I suppose maybe depends on how the ars writer takes notes, and maybe should be an opportunity for reflection on how they do that to not have this happen again. Especially since it sounds likely they do ai investigation as part of their main job.

                I mean, the Covid piece is certainly interesting, and sounds like a failure of ars to offer real sick time or a backup writer or something. I’m not sure.

                All around, a big mess. Though, the blog in question was a fascinating read.