A true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM output than anyone else.

But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the journalist? New questions for the new agentic society.

Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing fraudulent quotes.

Oh right, being ill is what caused the error. I can bet that if you start verifying the past content from this author, you will see similar AI slop. Either that or he has been always ill with very little sleep.

Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.

Last year I went viral, and Benji was the first person to interview me. It was a really cool experience, we chatted via Twitter dms, and he wrote a piece about my work - overall did a decent job.

Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he wanted to cover us. No response.

Then, tech crunch wrote an article on our project.

I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded, but said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive that he could only report on things that didn't have any prior or pre-existing coverage (?)

I thought that was rather strange, especially since we already had built up a relationship.

I don't really have a moral or lesson to this story, other than that journalism can be rather opaque sometimes.

Oh one other tip for anyone reading this - if you do ever get reached out to by journalists, communicate in writing, not a phone call so you can be VERY precise in your wordings.

I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business.

Sure there is such a thing as a naysayer but there are also people think all forms of valid criticism are just naysaying.

I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.

This whole story involved asking Claude to mine this text for quotes, which refused because it included harassment related content, then asking ChatGPT to explain that, and so on.

That entire ordeal probably generated more text from the chatbots than just reading the few paragraphs of the blogpost. That's why I think the "I'm sick" angle doesn't matter much. This is the same brainrot as people who go "grok what does this mean" under every twitter post. It's like a schoolchild who cheats and expends more energy cheating than just learning what they're supposed to.

When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?

In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.

There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.

It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.