Totally Human Emdash User

In fairness, the swastika was important to Hinduism long before Nazi Germany started using it, and one could argue that Indians should not feel that they need to give the symbol up just because some Europeans misused it.

On the other hand, do you think this would be giving them too much benefit of the doubt? Hindu nationalism seems to be pretty scary, after all.

How much success have you had with that approach?

Just to be clear, the article itself was written by him; he was just experimenting with an AI tool to extract quotes (because learning about AI tools is literally his job), and because he had COVID at the time he got mixed up and pasted paraphrased quotes rather than original quotes. (Arguably he should not have been experimenting with a new tool while sick, but I am willing to cut him some slack because he was probably not thinking clearly at the time.)

The serious thing here is actually not so much that he used an AI tool at some point in the process but that fabricated quotes ended up in a published article.

It helps if you think of America as believing that when an individual gets sick it is their own fault.

Yes… hence the “ill-advised” part.

I do not see it as being so implausible that he got mixed up due to being sick and thought he was doing one thing while he was actually doing another; as you said, among other things, he should probably reflect on how he takes notes.

I think that my overall point stands that there is not a good reason not to at least tentatively give him the benefit of the doubt that he screwed up in the way that he said that he screwed up, rather than assuming that he is lying and actually did something significantly worse, especially given that he fully admits to having screwed up and took full responsibility for it.

It is literally his job to be familiar with this technology, which he cannot do if he does not experiment with it.

Having said that, doing this experiment while sick was probably ill-advised, so in that sense I agree with you, but in fairness he probably was not thinking clearly while he was sick.

So in other words, you are just making an assumption.

Fair enough. Realistically, my understanding is that he and the other authors are part of WGA, so Ars would be required to go through an investigative process before firing him, which would probably take enough time that he would have had plenty of time to recover from COVID before having to hunt for a job.

Having said that, I am out for change, not for blood. I think that if Ars announced that the root problem was the lack of sick leave so it was a systemic failure rather than a personal failure (or something along those lines), then that might actually be a pretty good outcome as well.

He was using the AI to help him extract quotes; it makes sense that, as the head AI writer, he would be experimenting with new AI tools to become more familiar with them. It sounds like he just got confused at some point at mixed up a paraphrasing of the AI tool with an original quote, and it sounds like he was not in the best shape when writing this article so he made a dumb mistake. Regardless, arguably the use of AI here is a red herring, because if he had double-checked his quotes and fixed them then it would not have mattered whether he used AI or not.

I think that damning his entire career over this would be too extreme. I suspect that his will be a very good learning experience for him, but that unfortunately he will need to apply his lessons at another place of employment.

Agreed, why is why I really do not like how much people are beating on him, but the problem remains that he published an article with fabricated quotes, which hurts not only his own credibility but that of Ars as a whole. I think that it may be best for everyone if he applies the lessons that he learned at another place of employment.

(Also, though, Ars really needs to do something about its culture regarding working while sick, as that makes it inevitable that a mistake like this is going to be made, AI or not.)

There are plenty of people who are already piling on him. Is it really so bad that some of us feel the need to counter some of what is being said?

Why don’t you believe him?

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.

It makes me sad that we have reached a point where the very randomness that makes these kinds of stories charming (to someone with a twisted sense of humor like myself) also make them less likely to be coming from a human instead of more.

I had forgotten how big of a deal it was at the time! Thank you for the reminder.

It is fine to spend time experiencing human culture in its various forms. I doubt that anyone would see it as being negative he were reading a novel in that last panel.

It also is not a good look that they simply made the article disappear without any acknowledgement of why they took it down appearing on the front page. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, for now, that this was not intended as a coverup, but rather was just something they figured they could do quickly to retract the article while working out how to formally respond to what happened (e.g., they may need to fire the person involved). However, as you said, this kind of thing will just cause the matter to fester, especially since they are continuing to publish stories as if nothing had happened.

FYI, the article was presumably taken down because many of the quotes turned out to have been fabricated, and they said they were investigating this. (I don’t think that they are trying to cover up anything, just that they have not gotten around to written an official response yet, given that this is a recent development.)

Oh, interesting, I thought that was the definition of symbiosis!

(Also, don’t forget to escape the parenthesis in your Wikipedia link.)