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There is no need to rush to judgment on the internet instant-gratification timescale. If consequences are coming for journalist or publication, they are inevitable.

We’ll know more in only a couple days — how about we wait that long before administering punishment?

by llbbdd18 hours ago|

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It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you.

EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for typos, or maligned sources. Nobody typed these quotes out and went "oops, that's not what Scott said". Benj Edwards or Kyle Orland pulled the lever on the bullshit slot machine and attacked someone's integrity with the result.

"In the past, though, the threat of anonymous drive-by character assassination at least required a human to be behind the attack. Now, the potential exists for AI-generated invective to infect your online footprint."

by rectang16 hours ago|

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We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception.

Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere days. I can wait that long before throwing away two lives, even if you can’t.

> Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them

Evaluating whether Ars Technica establishes credible accountability mechanisms, such as hiring an Ombud, is at least as important as punishing individuals.

by stateofinquiry12 hours ago|

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I agree that reserving judgement and separating the roles of individuals from the response of the organization are all critical here. Its not the first time that one of their staff were found to have behaved badly, in the case that jumps to my mind from a few years ago Peter Bright was sentenced to 12 years on sex charges involving a minor1. So, sometimes people do bad things, commit crimes, etc. but this may or may not have much to do with their employer.

Did Ars respond in any way after the conviction of their ex-writer? Better vetting of their hires might have been a response. Apparently there was a record of some questionable opinions held by the ex-writer. I don't know, personally, if any of their policies changed.

The current suspected bad behavior involved the possibility that the journalists were lacking integrity in their jobs. So if this possibility is confirmed I expect to see publicly announced structural changes in the editorial process at Ars Technica if I am to continue to be a subscriber and reader.

1 https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ex-ars-writer-sentence...

Edit: Fixed italics issue

by llbbdd14 hours ago|

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That's what bylines are for, though. Both authors are attributed, and are therefore both responsible. If they didn't both review the article before submitting that's their problem. It's exaggerating to call this throwing away two lives, if all they do for a living is hit the big green button on crap journalism then I'm fine with them re-skilling to something less detrimental.

by asddubs14 hours ago|

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I mean, he linked the archived article. You're one click away from the information if you really want to know.

by arduanika10 hours ago|

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I mean, I'm even more frustrated by this in Scott's original post:

> If you are the person who deployed this agent, please reach out. It’s important for us to understand this failure mode, and to that end we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document. I’m not upset and you can contact me anonymously if you’d like.

I can see where he's coming from, and I suppose he's being the bigger man in the situation, but at some point one of these reckless moltbrain kiddies is going to have to pay. Libel and extortion should carry penalties no matter whether you do it directly, or via code that you wrote, or via code that you deployed without reading it.

The AI's hit piece on Scott was pretty minor, so if we want to wait around for a more serious injury that's fine, just as long as we're standing ready to prosecute when (not 'if') it happens.