I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
Super disappointing for Arstechnica here.
Like, how does that even happen?
Poorly designed journalism-bot it sounds like. Ethics of not writing this yourself aside, it should be trivial to check that whatever is in quotes is at least a substring in the source text. If the LLM is the top layer, and any research it does is a tool call that is purely at its discretion, it’s going to end up failing silently like this.