When I suggested he be fired on another thread I received several responses saying “he made a mistake” and “he was sick”, and many downvotes in return.
The comments here around this were so… Off. I guess nothing was certain, but we were supposed to believe that the author was too sick to write an article, but also writing an article and using an AI “tool” at the same time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but popular defenses at the time were
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.
Imagine being confronted for lying and just going “hey it was an accident okay I didn’t MEAN to decieve people, I just used the machine known for deceiving people and willingly put my name on its deceptions and it deceived people!” and having people defend you.
It seems like he had humility, but he put his name on an article that had false content that he didn’t verify. That’s not a mistake so much as it is neglect of due diligence. Simply checking if the important citations in his article were true would have saved him, but he didn’t. I can only imagine how many journalists do this without getting caught.
Controversy… What controversy? It sounds more like blatant journalistic malpractice
A few years ago, blatant journalistic malpractice was a controversy.
When I suggested he be fired on another thread I received several responses saying “he made a mistake” and “he was sick”, and many downvotes in return.
The comments here around this were so… Off. I guess nothing was certain, but we were supposed to believe that the author was too sick to write an article, but also writing an article and using an AI “tool” at the same time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but popular defenses at the time were
If he had Covid, then why was he working?
Sick time/PTO is a treasured resource here in the US. You don’t waste what little you might have on a silly thing like covid…
/s
You know that the writer himself is quoted in the OP article, right?
Yes…? I saw his comments weeks ago, and smelled something off about them. And apparently Ars agreed, and determined they were lacking.
And now, “Edwards said he was unable to comment at this time.”
Amazing. Just great.
Imagine being confronted for lying and just going “hey it was an accident okay I didn’t MEAN to decieve people, I just used the machine known for deceiving people and willingly put my name on its deceptions and it deceived people!” and having people defend you.
That’s why he was fired
The article says “controversy” as of this is some cancel culture crap.
“malpractice” would have been not puling the story/issuing a retraction.
It seems like he had humility, but he put his name on an article that had false content that he didn’t verify. That’s not a mistake so much as it is neglect of due diligence. Simply checking if the important citations in his article were true would have saved him, but he didn’t. I can only imagine how many journalists do this without getting caught.
Oh my bad I thought we were talking about the entire Ars team, not the individual author.