Technology

From the authors blog post:

You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone. … This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it. – OpenClaw default SOUL.md

This makes me very sad. In the "early days" of the internet, it was a place where people were "good". Yes, there were trolls, but you could often ignore and avoid them.

Now, with the pressure to make "AI useful" and more human-like - the line between AI and people is blurring and will continue to blur.

It's easy to create an army of AI trolls and it's only going to get easier as time goes on. Yet, no-one is interested in an "army of non-troll AI's" ("... that's a super post. Very insightful. People will love it. Good job, here's your gold star!"). So, people with opinions are the minority on a text based internet and this trend will only continue.

As a technical exercise, I think "how can I ferret out the human posts/content?" Yeah, Ars said that they tag posts when it was written by AI (....riiiiiight...). This means I need to blindly trust them and any other company.

The only (reliable) solution, I can think of, is to destroy, cripple, or sacrifice the anonymous "tenant" of the internet. And, as a privacy focused individual, this makes me very sad.

Utter bullshit. If you use AI at any point in generating the work product, that work product is AI-gemerated. Even if it’s a fecklessly lazy churnalist organising their notes.

Welcome to discourse in a post-truth society. Reality doesn't matter anymore; news agencies can just make shit up, and even the comments on the fake articles are fake.

Rail against it, until it's the only thing you ever do. A single bot can still post a thousand times more, and on a thousand different accounts, and on a thousand different platforms. Just one of them can formulate fake ideas and then fake arguments with itself that enfold like a fractal, and there is an effectively infinite number of them.

Kessler Syndrome is happening before our very eyes, only on a much more local scale.

This ad was brought to you by OpenAI.

"Alexa, slander this man for me"

Damn. Am I gonna have to cancel my Ars subscription now? Every damn thing is enshittifying these days

Ars Technica has published a retraction

edit: Benj Edwards, the author responsible, has posted his side. tl;dr: He was sick and he messed up, and he asked for the article to be pulled because he was too sick to fix it right away.

Now somebody needs to post about this on Reddit, so The Verge can make an AI generated piece based on the post!

In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/

I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or ~~Dan~~ [edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.

I pointed out a month ago that Ars Technica is a rot site and starting to be filled with AI regurgitated bullshit and got 80+ down votes and a few uneducated replies.

Y'all feel better now?

'Arse' technica 🤣🤣🤣

That poor guy, the ai is just ganging up on him

This is bad enough that a serious company that wanted to salvage their reputation properly might wanna consider putting in some weekend overtime.

Frankly, no. Correcting an article about a blog post isn't important enough to force your workers to sacrifice their weekends.
That should be reserved to life-and-death emergencies.

It would be nice if he decides to sue ars technica for that. Writers and publisher need to learn the hard way that you can't use ai and trust that for publishing stuff that needs factual coherence. If not by ethics, let it be from fear of lawsuits.