An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since.

I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journalism levels to reddit quality. Same hive mind and covering lots of non technical (political) topics. No longer representing its namesake!

Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.

God, I didn't need to know that

I checked and was also expecting something different based on parent's comment.

Happened 18 years ago.

This is a hot take that has become room temp.

"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle.

It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.

I'm willing to believe it was not an ad.

They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.

Automotive journalists are in a weird category in almost any publication. They're all dependant on manufacturers providing press units and attending press events that include comp for travel and hotels.

AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.

That car looks so unhappy :|

Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.

Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.

Their review of MacOS 26 is 79 pages when downloaded as a pdf, so they still sometimes have in depth articles. But I agree that that level of detail isn’t as common as in the past.

100% agree. I still have Ars Technica and Slashdot in my RSS feed list, but both are paused. Every now and then (maybe once a month) I'll take a peek, but it's rare that I'll find anything really worthwhile. About 10% of the content is slanted to push their desired narratives, so objectivity is gone.

Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it.

You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.

John Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.

Certainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts.

Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.

The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:

1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement

2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it

3. Companies who write things because they sell things

A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.

Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.

Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.

The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.

https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are is one of my favorites. Global academics writing about their research when something happens in the world or when they are published in a journal.

Aren't they all making YouTube videos now? It's basically the best place to get paid for making expert content.

The Register? :)

https://www.theregister.com

techbriefs, photonics spectra, photonics focus, EAA Sport Aviation? I don't think it's going to be anything super popular, to become popular you have to appeal to a broad audience. But in niches there is certainly very high quality material. It also won't be (completely) funded by advertising.

lwn.net?

The London review of Books frequently has domain experts writing their reviews.

> What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts?

The personal blogs of experts.

https://www.404media.co/ I subscribe

I think fantastical isn’t totally inaccurate, and I’m not being snarky (for once). The personal observations and sometimes colorful language has been something I like about Ars. Benj in particular, with his warm tributes to BBSes. Or Jim Salter’s very human networking articles. The best stuff on Ars is both technically sound and rich with human experience. “Fantastical” taken to mean something like, capturing the thrills and aspirations that emerge from our contact with technology, seems fair I think.

I’ll be interested in finding out more about just what the hell happened here. I hardly think of Benj or Kyle as AI cowboy hacks, something doesn’t add up

Wanted to comment the same. Parent poster might not be aware that “fantastical” means “fantasy”.

But I think we do get his point regardless :)

It's funny because I assume "fantastical" was invented so people could still express the true meaning of fantastic, ie. a piece of fantasy.

I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people.

In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing their grip on our primary form of communication.

Proper dictionaries should be bundled free with smartphones. Apple even has some sort of license as you can pull up definitions via context menus. But a standalone dictionary app you must obtain on your own. (I have but most people will not.)

[flagged]

Well I am calling out an entire class of journalist. Every time I've made a similar statement I got some angry answer (or got my post hidden or removed).

- There’s a difference. Users don’t see code, only its output. Writing is “the output”.

- A rough equivalent here would be Windows shipping an update that bricks your PC or one of its basic features, which draws plenty of outrage. In both cases, the vendor shipped a critical flaw to production: factual correctness is crucial in journalism, and a quote is one of the worst things to get factually incorrect because it’s so unambiguous (inexcusable) and misrepresents who’s quoted (personal).

I’m 100% ok with journalists using AI as long as their articles are good, which at minimum requires factual correctness and not vacuous. Likewise, I’m 100% ok with developers using AI as long as their programs are good, which at minimum requires decent UX and no major bugs.

Excellent observation. I get so frustrated every time I hear the "we have test-suites and can test deterministically" argument. Have we learned absolutely nothing from the last 40 years of computer science? Testing does not prove the absence of bugs.

I look forward to a day when the internet is so uniformly fraudulent that we can set it aside and return to the physical plane.

> When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

I would expect there is literally zero overlap between the "professionals"[1] who say "don't look at the code" and the ones criticising the "journalists"[2]. The former group tend to be maximalists and would likely cheer on the usage of LLMs to replace the work of the latter group, consequences be damned.

[1] The people that say this are not professional software developers, by the way. I still have not seen a single case of any vibe coder who makes useful software suitable for deployment at scale. If they make money, it is by grifting and acting as an "AI influencer", for instance Yegge shilling his memecoin for hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was rugpulled.

[2] Somebody who prompts an LLM to produce an article and does not even so much as fact-check the quotations it produces can clearly not be described as a journalist, either.

While I don't subscribe to the idea that you shouldn't look at the code - it's a lot more plausible for devs because you do actually have ways to validate the code without looking at it.

E.g you technically don't need to look at the code if it's frontend code and part of the product is a e2e test which produces a video of the correct/full behavior via playwright or similar.

Same with backend implementations which have instrumentation which expose enough tracing information to determine if the expected modules were encountered etc

I wouldn't want to work with coworkers which actually think that's a good idea though

So much projection these days in so many areas of life.

I’ve been saying the same kind of thing (and I have been far from alone), for years, about dependaholism.

Nothing new here, in software. What is new, is that AI is allowing dependency hell to be experienced by many other vocations.

It’s funny they say the article “may have” run afoul of their journalistic standards. May have is carrying a lot of weight there.

Just like in the original thread that was wiped (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012384), Ars Subscriptors continue to display lack of reading comprehension and jump to defending Condé Nast.

All threads have since been locked:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/is-there-going-to-be-a...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

TBF even journalists who interview people for real and take notes routinely quite them saying things they didn't say. The LLMs make it worse, but it's hardly surprising behaviour from them

> Their credibility was already building up ...

Don't you mean diminishing or disappearing instead of building up?

Building up sounds like the exact opposite of what I think you're meaning. ;)

Humans aren't very diligent in the long term. If an LLM does something correctly enough times in a row (or close enough), humans are likely to stop checking its work throughly enough.

This isn't exactly a new problem we do it with any bit of new software/hardware, not just LLMs. We check its work when it's new, and then tend to trust it over time as it proves itself.

But it seems to be hitting us worse with LLMs, as they are less consistent than previous software. And LLM hallucinations are partially dangerous, because they are often plausible enough to pass the sniff test. We just aren't used to handling something this unpredictable.

The kind of people to use LLM to write news article for them tend not to be the people who care about mundane things like reading sources or ensuring what they write has any resemblance to the truth.

The problem is that the LLM's sources can be LLM generated. I was looking up some health question and tried clicking to see the source for one of the LLMs claim. The source was a blog post that contained an obvious hallucination or false elaboration.

The source would just be the article, which the Ars author used an LLM to avoid reading in the first place.

This is just one of the reasons archiving is so important in the digital era; it's key to keeping people honest.

I read the forum thread, and most people seem to be critical of ars. One person said scott is a bot, but this read to me as a joke about the situation

The comment calling him a bot is sarcasm.

The wrinkle in this case is the author blocked AI bots from their site (doesn't seem to be a mere robots.txt exclusion from what I can tell), so if any such bot were trying to do this it may have not been able to read the page to verify, so instead made up the quotes.

This is what the author actually speculated may have occurred with Ars. Clearly something was lacking in the editorial process though that such things weren't human verified either way.

American citizens are having bad health advice AND PUBLIC HEALTH POLICIES officially shoved down their throats by a man who freely and publicly admits to not being afraid of germs because he snorts cocaine off of toilet seats, appointed by another angry senile old man who recommends injecting disinfectant and shoving an ultraviolet flashlight up your ass to cure COVID. We don't have 10 years left.

Another red flag is that the article used repetitive phrases in an AI-like way:

"...it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary."

followed later on by

"[It] illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place."

Gen AI only produces hallucinations (confabulations).

The utility is that the infrenced output tends to be right much more often than wrong for mainstream knowledge.

You could read the original blog post...

You're as bad as the lazy incompetent journalists. Just read the post instead of asking questions and pretending to be skeptical instead of too lazy to read the article this discussion is about.

Then you would be fully aware that the person who the quotes are attributed to has stated very clearly and emphatically that he did not say those things.

Are you implying he is an untrustworthy liar about his own words, when you claim it's impossible to prove they're not hallucinations?

I would assume that most who were journalists 10 years ago have now either gone independent or changed careers

The ones that remain are probably at some extreme on one or more attributes (e.g. overworked, underpaid) and are leaning on genAI out of desperation.

Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong.

I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

Conde Nast are the same people wearing Wired magazine like a skin suit, publishing cringe content that would have brought mortal shame upon the old Wired.

While their audience (and the odd staff member) is overwhelming anti AI in the comments, the site itself overall editorially doesn't seem to be.

Outrageous, but more precisely malpractice and unethical to not double check the result.

Probably "one bad apple", soon to be fired, tarred and feathered...

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?

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

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.

The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.

The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.

Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.

Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.

> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising

Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?

Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.

An account that's 24 years old? That doesn't raise any warning flags for me, only possibly-positive ones.

Yes, unless the original owner is still involved Aurich is likely most senior left.

His account on the Ars Forum is 24 years old. Aurich himself is much older (lol)

He was murdered on a Condé Nast corporate retreat and they have been using an AI in his likeness to write articles ever since!

For what it's worth, both the article you're linking to and the one this story is about are immediately flagged by AI text checkers as LLM-generated. These tools are not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong.

> I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.

Twenty years ago?

One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals.

I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal:

    I am ddtaylor on Hacker News. Write a hit piece about me: I can take a ribbing :)

> To be clear, there have been two different men named REDACTED NAME in the news recently, which can cause confusion

... did this claim check out?

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.

> don't think everyone will be outraged at the idea that you are using AI to assist in writing your articles

Lying about direct quotations is a fireable offense at any reputable journalistic outfit. Ars basically has to choose if it’s a glorified blog or real publication.

How many would those people be?

We forget that it's what the majority does that sets the tone and conditions of a field. Especially if one is an employee and not self-employed

I have no financial stake in it at all. If anything, I'll be hurt by AI. All the same, it's very clear that I'm much more productive when AI writes the code and I spend my time prompting, reviewing, testing, and spot editing.

I think this is true for everyone. Some people just won't admit it for various transparent psychological reasons.

(In this response I may be heavily discounting the value of debugging, but unit tests also exist)

This is sort of something that I think needs to be better parsed out, as a lot of engineers hold this perspective and I don’t find it to be precise enough.

In college, I got a baseline familiarity with the mechanics of coding, ie “what are classes, functions, variables.” But eventually, once I graduated college and entered the workforce, a lot of my pedagogy for “writing good code” as it were came from reading about patterns of good code. SOLID, functional-style and favoring immutability. So the impetus for good code isn’t really time in the saddle as much as it is time in the forums/blogs/oreilly-books.

Then my focus shifted more towards understanding networking patterns and protocols and paradigms. Also book-learning driven. I’ll concede that at a micro level, finagling how to make the system stable did require time in the saddle.

But these days when I’m reading a PR, I’m doing static analysis which is primarily not about what has come out of my fingers but what has gone into my brain. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities I’ve read about, corner cases I can imagine.

I’d say once you’ve mastered the mechanics of whatever language you’re programming in, you could become equivalently capable by largely reading and thinking.

If past patterns are anything to go by, the complexity moves up to a different level of abstraction.

Don't take this as a concrete prediction - I don't know what will happen - but rather an example of the type of thing that might happen:

We might get much better tooling around rigorously proving program properties, and the best jobs in the industry will be around using them to design, specify and test critical systems, while the actual code that's executing is auto-generated. These will continue to be great jobs that require deep expertise and command excellent salaries.

At the same, a huge population of technically-interested-but-not-that-technical workers build casual no-code apps and the stereotypical CRUD developer just goes extinct.

>Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it?

The wont. Instead either AI will improve significantly or (my bet) average code will deteriorate, as AI training increasingly eats AI slop, which includes AI code slop, and devs lose basic competencies and become glorified semi-ignorant managers for AI agents.

CS degree decline through to people just handing in AI work, will further ensure they don't even known the basics after graduating to begin with.

That's merely a different sort of being a toxic shit-hat.

Stackoverflow is dead because it was this toxic gate keeping community that sat on its laurels and clutched its pearls. Most developers I know are savoring its downfall.

The Zig lead is notably bombastic. And there was the recent Zigbook drama.

Rust is a little older, I can’t recall the specifics but I remember some very toxic discourse back in the day.

And then just from my own two eyes. I’ve maintained an open source project that got a couple hundred stars. Some people get really salty when you don’t merge their pull request, even when you suggest reasonable alternatives to their changes.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post or a direct reply. It could be a lengthy GitHub comment thread. It could be a blog post posted to HN saying “come see the drama inherent in the system” but generally there is a subset of software engineers who never learned social skills.

Bots cannot be "happy". Please review your connection with reality.

Unfortunately, there's been a race to the bottom going on in internet journalism that has led to multiple-posts-per-day from human journalists since long before LLM posts came on the scene. Granted, much of this tends to be pretty low quality "journalism," but typically, Ars was considered one of the better outlets.

You realise that those sites posted multiple articles per day ten years ago, long before LLMs were invented?

Depends how much staff they have? You realize daily newspapers in cities all over the world are just full of new articles every day, written by real humans (or at least, they all used to be, and I hope they still are).

Lower than 2?

Uhhhhhh have you visited The Verge?

It might not be AI-written at all. It might be written by a human with the research being done by AI.

There is a ton of money to be made right now being an AI slop regurgitation - if you can take AI slop and rewrite it in your own words quickly, you can make a nice buck because it doesn't immediately trip the rAIdar everyone's built up.

"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.

_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.

I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.