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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?