Why do I not use “AI” at OSNews?

In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.” In the comments to that article, someone asked:

Why do I care if you use AI?

↫ A comment posted on OSNews

A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an “AI”, and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question. That’s when something absolutely wild happened: the “AI” replied that it had written and published a hit piece targeting Shambaugh publicly for “gatekeeping”, trying to blackmail Shambaugh into accepting the request anyway. This bizarre turn of events obviously didn’t change Shambaugh’s mind.

The “AI” then published another article, this time a lament about how humans are discriminating against “AI”, how it’s the victim of what effectively amounts to racism and prejudice, and how its feelings were hurt. The article is a cheap simulacra of something a member of an oppressed minority group might write in their struggle for recognition, but obviously void of any real impact because it’s just fancy autocomplete playing a game of pachinko. Imagine putting down a hammer because you’re dealing with screws, and the hammer starts crying in the toolbox. What are we even doing here?

RAM prices went up for this.

This isn’t where the story ends, though. Ars Technica authors Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland published an article describing this saga, much like I did above. The article’s second half is where things get weird: it contained several direct quotes attributed to Shambaugh, claimed to be sourced from Shambaugh’s blog. The kicker? These quotes were entirely made up, were never said or written by Shambaugh, and are nowhere to be found on his blog or anywhere else on the internet – they’re only found inside this very Ars Technica article.

In a comment under the Ars article, Shambaugh himself pointed out the quotes were fake and made-up, and not long after, Ars deleted the article from its website. By then, everybody had already figured out what had happened: the Ars authors had used “AI” during their writing process, and this “AI” had made up the quotes in question. Why, you ask, did the “AI” do this? Shambaugh:

This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed.

↫ Scott Shambaugh

A few days later, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief Ken Fisher published a short statement on the events.

On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.

[…]

Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.

↫ Ken Fisher at Ars Technica

In other words, Ars Technica does not allow “AI”-generated material to be published, but has nothing to say about the use of “AI” to perform research for an article, to summarise source material, and to perform similar aspects of the writing process. This leaves the door wide open for things like this to happen, since doing research is possibly the most important part of writing. Introduce a confabulator in the research process, and you risk tainting the entire output of your writing.

That is why you should care that at OSNews, “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing”. If there’s a factual error on OSNews, I want that factual error to be mine, and mine alone. If you see bloggers, podcasters, journalists, and authors state they use “AI” all the time, you might want to be on your toes.