The current title (“Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article”) isn’t correct, it wasn’t the prompt that was printed, but trailing chatbot fluff:
> If you want, I can also create an even snappier “front-page style” version with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout—perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?
The article in question is titled “Auto sales rev up in October” and is an exceedingly dry slab of statistic-laden prose, of the sort that LLMs love to err in (though there’s no indication of whether they have or not), and for which alternative (non-prose) presentations can be drastically better. Honestly, if the entire thing came from “here’s tabular data, select insights and churn out prose”… I can understand not wanting to do such drudgework.
The newspaper in question is Pakistan's English language "newspaper of record", which has wide readership.
For some reason, they rarely ever add any graphs or tables to financial articles, which I have never understood. Their readership is all college educated. One time I read an Op-Ed, where the author wrote something like: If you go to this gov webpage, and take the data and put it on excel, and plot this thing vs that thing, you will see X trend.
Why would they not just take the excel graph, clean it up and put it in their article?
Gemini has been doing this to me for the past few weeks at the end of basically every single response now, and it often seems to result in the subsequent responses getting off track and lower quality as all these extra tangets start polluting the context. Not to mention how distracting it is as it throws off the reply I was already halfway in the middle of composing by the time I read it.
For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.
This dates back to at least the late 1990s for financial reports. A friend demoed such a system to me at that time.
Much statistically-based news (finance, business reports, weather, sport, disasters, astronomical events) are heavily formulaic and can at least in large part or initial report be automated, which speeds information dissemination.
Of course, it's also possible to distribute raw data tables, charts, or maps, which ... mainstream news organisations seem phenomenally averse to doing. Even "better" business-heavy publications (FT, Economist, Bloomberg, WSJ) do so quite sparingly.
A few days ago I was looking at a Reuters report on a strategic chokepoint north of the Philippines which it and the US are looking toward to help contain possible Chinese naval operations. Lots of pictures of various equipment, landscapes, and people. Zero maps. Am disappoint.
...
The rules for the race: Both contenders waited for Denny's, the diner company, to come out with an earnings report. Once that was released, the stopwatch started. Both wrote a short radio story and get graded on speed and style.
StatSheet, an online platform covering college basketball, runs entirely on an automated program. In 2006, Thomson Reuters announced their switch to automation to generate financial news stories on its online news platform. Reuters used a tool called Tracer. An algorithm called Quakebot published a story about a 2014 California earthquake on The Los Angeles Times website within three minutes after the shaking had stopped.
Sports and financial are the two easiest to do since they both work from well structured numeric statistics.
In the mid-late naughts, there used to be a content farm called "Associated Content". They would get daily lists of top searched terms from various search engines (Yahoo, Dogpile, Altavista, etc. etc.) and for each search term, pay an English major to write a 2-page fluff article. Regardless of what the topic was, they churned out articles by the bushel. Then they place ads on these articles and sat back and watched the dollars roll in.
A non-"AI" template is probably getting filled in with numbers straight from some relevant source. AI may produce something more conversational today but as someone else observed, this is a high-hallucination point for them. Even if they get one statistic right they're pretty inclined to start making up statistics that weren't provided to them at all if they sound good.
Not just that we know from heavy reddit posters that they have branching universe templates for all eventualities, so that they are "ready" whatever the outcome.
I guess in the end the journalist didn't feel necessary to impact his readers with punchy one line stats and bold infographic-ready layouts, considering he opted for the first draft.
Do we know it was an AI? I realize that it rings with a sycophantic tone that the AIs love to use, but I've worked with some humans who speak the same way. AIs didn't invent brownnosing.
When reached for comment on how this occurred, the journalist in question replied:
“This is the perfect question that gets to the heart of this issue. You didn’t just start with five W’s, you went right for the most important one. Let’s examine why that question works so well in this instance…”
You're absolutely right! but they can shove this euphemism. Just say that chatgpt wrote the article and no one read it before publishing, no need for all the fluff.
They do not deserve a shred of recommendation. This is just damage control, pretending that it did not happen never was an option. Instead they tried to claim that it was just a one of mistake. What it really shows is that nobody even bothers to read their articles before hitting publish and that AI is widely used internally.
Fair play to them for owning up to their mistake, and not just pretending like it didn't happen!
That's what the legitimate media has done for the last couple of hundred years. Every issue of the New York Times has a Corrections section. I think the Washington Post's is called Corrections and Amplifications.
Bloggers just change the article and hope it didn't get cached in the Wayback Machine.
The editors were laid off and replaced by an LLM. Or more likely, the editorial staff was cut in half and the ones who were kept were told to use LLMs to handle the increased workload.
"This newspaper report was originally edited using AI, which is in violation of Dawn’s current AI policy. The policy is also available on our website. The report also carried some junk, which has now been edited out. The matter is being investigated. The violation of AI policy is regretted. — Editor"
edit: Text link of the printed edition. Might not be perfect OCR, but I don't think they changed anything except to delete the AI comment at the end! https://pastebin.com/NYarkbwm
That's just a manner of speaking in former British colonies, or at least the subcontinent. Much of formal speech like a bureaucrat wrote it because, well, the civil service ran India and that's who everyone emulated.
OTOH kudos to them for regretting AI slop (even if they don't want to point out who precisely is regretting). I know some who'd vehemently deny in spite of evidence.
Of course, since we live in 1984 already everything is edited as is convenient. For all that technology has given, nobody talks about what it has taken away.
Which raises the question: if everything is generated, why bother reading it at all?
Just ask the LLM what you want to know—why treat headlines like bookmarks?
You can use the LLM, but you don't also have the rest of the data they relied on. A LLM can generate everything if it starts from a minimal prompt, but this is a recipe for slop. If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate, the article will reflect your ideas and the data if was fed.
I know it is fashionable to put everything a LLM outputs in the slop box, but I don't think it reflects reality.
I get that transforming a bunch of facts into prose is boring.
As a reader, I can't get over the fact that I'm supposed to read a text that nobody could be bothered to write.
I wonder how often we waste energy nowadays by telling an AI to turn a one-sentence-prompt into a full e-mail, only for the other side to tell the AI to summarize it in one sentence.
As much as the default LLMisms are annoying me, it's also a honeymoon period right now where you can even suspect whether something is AI generated based on the default LLM-isms. Word about how to fix their tone has been getting around in academia for a while amongst students trying to pass detection filters, once they're out into the world we can expect to have even more AI generated content masked behind individualized, unique style prompts that aren't immediately recognizable as the default LLM voice.
I think better to put that someone extra further up in the pipeline who knows how to prompt the LLM correctly so that it doesn't generate the fluff to begin with.
Or get software engineers to produce domain specific tooling rather than the domain relying on generic tooling which lead to such mistakes (although this is speculation.. but still to me it seems like the author of that article was using the vanilla ChatGPT client)
/s I am now thinking of setting up an "AI Consultancy" which will be able to provide both these resources to those seeking such services. I mean, why have only one of those when both are available.
"This article will be posted on our prestigious news site. Our readers don't know that most of our content is AI slop that our 'writers' didn't even glance over once, so please check if you find anything that was left over from the LLM conversation and should not be left in the article. If you find anything that shouldn't stay in the article, please remove it. Don't say 'done' and don't add your own notes or comment, don't start a conversation with me, just return the cleaned up article."
And someone will put "Prompt Engineer" in their resume.
Considering there’s lawyers risking their careers by using AI, I think the lesson here is that if you allow people to be lazy they will. Humans are built for efficiency.
If a beginner writer thinks AI can write a better article than they can, it seems like they’ll just rely on the AI and never hone their craft.
This mostly harms written journalism. As people seek humanness in their media, they'll be driven even more into the dens of cult-leaders masquerading as podcaster-journalists. The media environment is becoming so terminally awful, and each year it keeps getting worse, for decades now.
So is the documentation and specs that I'm provided by stakeholders...but I can't prove it..
Suddenly they write very long and detailed documentation, yet they can't remember what's in it.
My gf says that in her banks she suspects half the written communications are ai-authored, which is driving productivity to the ground. Her bank moreover is very aggressive with endless workshops on AI usage (they have some enterprise gemini version).
The more I see the impact of AI, the more worried I am.
I'm not saying it doesn't have use cases, I myself leverage it when coding (albeit I use a man-in-the-middle approach where I ask questions and tinker with it, I never let AI write code except in some very rare boilerplate-y scenarios) and have built products that leverage it.
But it seems like the trend is to increasingly _delegate_ work to it, and I'm seeing more negatives than positives.
This has happened more than once, in different scenarios.
I wonder why is it that GhatGPT (and the rest) don't put the actual response in a box that is separate from the "hello" and "goodbye" part.
I once wrote a message to my landlord, and I asked ChatGPT to help me make the message better (being that english is not my mother tongue) and I included the "goodbye" part by mistake.
LLM's don't have any internal concept of "actual response" vs "surrounding words". Just like they don't have a internal concept of system prompt vs user input. Just like they don't even have an internal concept of what the LLM emitted vs what was given to it! It's all just one long sequence.
(Yes, it is possible to create tokens to represent category changes, but this is still in-band. the token is still just part of the sequence and the LLM isn't guaranteed to factor it in correctly)
Hmm, for some reason I assumed that printing referred to a figure of speech here (like they went to press or something), but no, it's actually printed, AI call to action included.
I think a brilliant solution for these issues would be to get into the habit of asking the AI to double check the article before the final copy-paste.
I think the greater issue here is the possibility of the entire article being AI slop and the 'doomed' direction in which we are heading where reputed sources of information are churning out slop.
Completion API is only half the product. Teams integrate these tools into production with nothing but policy documents between them & incidents. The guardrail system does not exist for a reason. No business model. No investors. No revenue stream.
Tesla didn't just build FSD. They had to build a verification layer: driver cameras, steering sensors, attention alerts. That parallel software makes autopilot road ready.
Similar thing happened in. Bangladesh. The leading national daily English newspaper printed not the prompt, but included a follow up comment/question from AI.
One of the great advantages of AI for non english native speakers is the ability of the tool to speak in better English than the writer. With so many young journalists graduating from school using AI instead of learning the full language, this use would become more frequent.
At my work place, non native speakers would send me documents for grammatical corrections. They don’t do that anymore! Hoorah!
Great advantages for the writer. It's not a great advantage for the reader. The AI could completely change the meaning of the article and the author would be none the wiser.
What shocks me more than the copy-pasting from ChatGPT (which might actually be more relevant than a journalist paid peanuts) is that it means the articles are never proofread before being published. Even if the article had been written by a human, it would be a disaster and would say a lot about the level of misinformation that can slip through an underpaid newsroom.
I keep seeing those mistakes a lot recently, especially the [insert something here] that is inside a wall of text where the AI is keeping the option to the users to edit!
In 2022, my opinion of journalism was low. Decades of headlines which were objectively false but no retraction, just doubling down on their state propaganda.
There were some papers that I still trusted. Then AI hit journalism with a silly stick and utterly wrecked them all.
Mind you, I love AI. I however can admit that AI seems to have wrecked what was left of journalism.
Actually, at some point, it makes sense to be honest about usage of AI and not feeling to hide that. Just like how food products are expected to print about the ingredients.
One should not feel ashamed to declare the usage of AI, just like you are not ashamed to use a calculator.
I feel like there is a difference here. A calculator has no bias. LLMs do, obviously. News is not the place for bias. Unless the LLM used hallucinated the operator’s intentions, the operator was using the LLM to doctor the article to capture readers not report the news.
I don't see why a content can't carry a label saying "AI-generated", or "Reviewed by AI", or "Refined using AI" etc. This allows consumer to consume it with appropriate caution.
TBH, I think that journalists tying themselves into pretzels in an effort to remain unbiased does more damage than the presence of some bias. As a consumer of news, I want journalists to be biased, for example, towards the rule of law, the preservations of institutions, and checks & balances, and even norms.
The current title (“Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article”) isn’t correct, it wasn’t the prompt that was printed, but trailing chatbot fluff:
> If you want, I can also create an even snappier “front-page style” version with punchy one-line stats and a bold, infographic-ready layout—perfect for maximum reader impact. Do you want me to do that next?
The article in question is titled “Auto sales rev up in October” and is an exceedingly dry slab of statistic-laden prose, of the sort that LLMs love to err in (though there’s no indication of whether they have or not), and for which alternative (non-prose) presentations can be drastically better. Honestly, if the entire thing came from “here’s tabular data, select insights and churn out prose”… I can understand not wanting to do such drudgework.
The newspaper in question is Pakistan's English language "newspaper of record", which has wide readership.
For some reason, they rarely ever add any graphs or tables to financial articles, which I have never understood. Their readership is all college educated. One time I read an Op-Ed, where the author wrote something like: If you go to this gov webpage, and take the data and put it on excel, and plot this thing vs that thing, you will see X trend.
Why would they not just take the excel graph, clean it up and put it in their article?
Maybe the model just wasn’t multi-modal back then ;)
Because it was BS opinion, dressed in scientifical sounding clothing?
> it wasn’t the prompt that was printed, but trailing chatbot fluff
I've seen that sort of thing copy/pasted in several emails at work, usually ones that are announcing something on a staff email list.
Sort of a givaway that the email isn't very important.
The AI is prompting the human here, so the title isn't strictly wrong. ;)
Gemini has been doing this to me for the past few weeks at the end of basically every single response now, and it often seems to result in the subsequent responses getting off track and lower quality as all these extra tangets start polluting the context. Not to mention how distracting it is as it throws off the reply I was already halfway in the middle of composing by the time I read it.
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I have decided to call it engagement bait.
For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.
This dates back to at least the late 1990s for financial reports. A friend demoed such a system to me at that time.
Much statistically-based news (finance, business reports, weather, sport, disasters, astronomical events) are heavily formulaic and can at least in large part or initial report be automated, which speeds information dissemination.
Of course, it's also possible to distribute raw data tables, charts, or maps, which ... mainstream news organisations seem phenomenally averse to doing. Even "better" business-heavy publications (FT, Economist, Bloomberg, WSJ) do so quite sparingly.
A few days ago I was looking at a Reuters report on a strategic chokepoint north of the Philippines which it and the US are looking toward to help contain possible Chinese naval operations. Lots of pictures of various equipment, landscapes, and people. Zero maps. Am disappoint.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...
https://www.wired.com/story/wordsmith-robot-journalist-downl... https://archive.ph/gSdmb
And this has been going on for a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism
Sports and financial are the two easiest to do since they both work from well structured numeric statistics.
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In the mid-late naughts, there used to be a content farm called "Associated Content". They would get daily lists of top searched terms from various search engines (Yahoo, Dogpile, Altavista, etc. etc.) and for each search term, pay an English major to write a 2-page fluff article. Regardless of what the topic was, they churned out articles by the bushel. Then they place ads on these articles and sat back and watched the dollars roll in.
A non-"AI" template is probably getting filled in with numbers straight from some relevant source. AI may produce something more conversational today but as someone else observed, this is a high-hallucination point for them. Even if they get one statistic right they're pretty inclined to start making up statistics that weren't provided to them at all if they sound good.
Not just that we know from heavy reddit posters that they have branching universe templates for all eventualities, so that they are "ready" whatever the outcome.
Both categories are and have-been bottom-feeder copy, and have been prior to the prevalence of LLMs.
Legitimate news organizations announce their use of A.I.
I believe the New York Times weather page is automated, but that started before the current "A.I." hype wave.
And I think the A.P. uses LLMs for some of its sports coverage.
I guess in the end the journalist didn't feel necessary to impact his readers with punchy one line stats and bold infographic-ready layouts, considering he opted for the first draft.
Thank you, yes that's accurate and I am not sure if article itself is accurate. Don't think so it would have no incorrect stats.
By "AI prompt" I mean "prompted by AI"
Edit: Note about prompt's nature.
It might be better to mention “Dawn newspaper” instead of “Pakistani newspaper”.
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>” and is an exceedingly dry slab of statistic-laden prose
Thats the kinda thing i'd be worried AI would say make up a stat in, something really boring that most people aren't going to follow up on to verify.
I think AI-Prompt is synonymous with the chat before an LLM prints the intended garbage.
The prompt is the chat before it prints the intended garbage. This is the engagement bait the LLM appends after the intended garbage.
Do we know it was an AI? I realize that it rings with a sycophantic tone that the AIs love to use, but I've worked with some humans who speak the same way. AIs didn't invent brownnosing.
When reached for comment on how this occurred, the journalist in question replied:
“This is the perfect question that gets to the heart of this issue. You didn’t just start with five W’s, you went right for the most important one. Let’s examine why that question works so well in this instance…”
That's a sharp comment–let's break down why that is.
Now I’ll have to look out for news posts that have a question in the title and begin with “Great question!”
A new twist on Betteridge's law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
"You're absolutely right!"
You’re absolutely right!
And here’s the kicker – …
Oh God, doubling down on it like crazy.
> You didn’t just start with five W’s, you went right for the most important one
Also the "it's not A, it's B" template
Would you like me to provide a brief summary of notable events in print media like this?
Now you're thinking like a *real investigative journalist*
"Would you like me to break this down for you in a table format?
That wasn’t a journalist, it was an LLM. But they forgot to add the prompt.
no shit, Sherlock! ;-)
The same thing happened to German magazine Spiegel recently, see the correction remark at the end of this article
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/deutsche-bahn-...
Scientific paper as well: <https://fediscience.org/@GeorgKrammer/115536337398227063>
Original <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.surfin.2024.104081> and retraction: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.surfin.2024.104081>.
I still think someone should have done this as a pun and get your paper trending everywhere.
Fair play to them for owning up to their mistake, and not just pretending like it didn't happen!
You're absolutely right! but they can shove this euphemism. Just say that chatgpt wrote the article and no one read it before publishing, no need for all the fluff.
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Maybe, although I'm a bit doubtful that they were 100% honest.
> Entgegen unseren Standards
As programmers I think we can extend some professional empathy and understanding: copy-and-pasting all day is a lot harder than you’d think.
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They do not deserve a shred of recommendation. This is just damage control, pretending that it did not happen never was an option. Instead they tried to claim that it was just a one of mistake. What it really shows is that nobody even bothers to read their articles before hitting publish and that AI is widely used internally.
Fair play to them for owning up to their mistake, and not just pretending like it didn't happen!
That's what the legitimate media has done for the last couple of hundred years. Every issue of the New York Times has a Corrections section. I think the Washington Post's is called Corrections and Amplifications.
Bloggers just change the article and hope it didn't get cached in the Wayback Machine.
"We regret to admit that our editors don't actually take the time to read these articles before hitting the PUBLISH button..."
The editors were laid off and replaced by an LLM. Or more likely, the editorial staff was cut in half and the ones who were kept were told to use LLMs to handle the increased workload.
This is the real issue; I'm sure journalists already use loads of shortcuts to do their job efficiently but the end responsible is the editor(s).
The online edition was edited later.
"This newspaper report was originally edited using AI, which is in violation of Dawn’s current AI policy. The policy is also available on our website. The report also carried some junk, which has now been edited out. The matter is being investigated. The violation of AI policy is regretted. — Editor"
https://www.dawn.com/news/1954574
edit: Text link of the printed edition. Might not be perfect OCR, but I don't think they changed anything except to delete the AI comment at the end! https://pastebin.com/NYarkbwm
> The violation of AI policy is regretted.
That's a good example of when you shouldn't use passive voice.
This is a convention for journalistic corrections, e.g., "The Times regrets the error", used to note corrections for at least a century:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/insider/the-times-regrets...>
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On the other hand, this way you know they probably didn't use the chatbot to write the apology.
> This door is alarmed
That's just a manner of speaking in former British colonies, or at least the subcontinent. Much of formal speech like a bureaucrat wrote it because, well, the civil service ran India and that's who everyone emulated.
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OTOH kudos to them for regretting AI slop (even if they don't want to point out who precisely is regretting). I know some who'd vehemently deny in spite of evidence.
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It's a good example of when you should use AI.
Of course, since we live in 1984 already everything is edited as is convenient. For all that technology has given, nobody talks about what it has taken away.
Which raises the question: if everything is generated, why bother reading it at all? Just ask the LLM what you want to know—why treat headlines like bookmarks?
One interesting thing about the LLM era is it really highlights what things in life actually add value.
how so, any examples
I haven’t had that experience at all. My experience is that if you allow people to be lazy they will be, at the expense of society.
What has your experience been like?
You can use the LLM, but you don't also have the rest of the data they relied on. A LLM can generate everything if it starts from a minimal prompt, but this is a recipe for slop. If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate, the article will reflect your ideas and the data if was fed.
I know it is fashionable to put everything a LLM outputs in the slop box, but I don't think it reflects reality.
> If you come with materials, discuss them, their implications, express your POV and then generate
Then the LLM can still make shit up and be absolutely wrong.
exactly what we're trending towards.
I get that transforming a bunch of facts into prose is boring.
As a reader, I can't get over the fact that I'm supposed to read a text that nobody could be bothered to write.
I wonder how often we waste energy nowadays by telling an AI to turn a one-sentence-prompt into a full e-mail, only for the other side to tell the AI to summarize it in one sentence.
I would be happy to read boring facts without the fluff
Soon whole world will be fluent in impeccable American English, but only on paper.
I've instructed Gemini to never give me the american spellings of words, and to always pronounce Z the proper way. Never give up the fight.
Pretty easy to condition a prompt with regional idioms and spellyngs.
As much as the default LLMisms are annoying me, it's also a honeymoon period right now where you can even suspect whether something is AI generated based on the default LLM-isms. Word about how to fix their tone has been getting around in academia for a while amongst students trying to pass detection filters, once they're out into the world we can expect to have even more AI generated content masked behind individualized, unique style prompts that aren't immediately recognizable as the default LLM voice.
As people get comfortable with AI they'll get lazy and this will become common.
A solution is to put someone extra into the workflow to check the final result. This way AI will actually make more jobs. Ha!
I think better to put that someone extra further up in the pipeline who knows how to prompt the LLM correctly so that it doesn't generate the fluff to begin with.
Or get software engineers to produce domain specific tooling rather than the domain relying on generic tooling which lead to such mistakes (although this is speculation.. but still to me it seems like the author of that article was using the vanilla ChatGPT client)
/s I am now thinking of setting up an "AI Consultancy" which will be able to provide both these resources to those seeking such services. I mean, why have only one of those when both are available.
Or they will set up one more AI automation:
"This article will be posted on our prestigious news site. Our readers don't know that most of our content is AI slop that our 'writers' didn't even glance over once, so please check if you find anything that was left over from the LLM conversation and should not be left in the article. If you find anything that shouldn't stay in the article, please remove it. Don't say 'done' and don't add your own notes or comment, don't start a conversation with me, just return the cleaned up article."
And someone will put "Prompt Engineer" in their resume.
You know, there's joy in writing prose. Seems like people who are journalists shouldn't be journalists if they're not getting that fact.
Considering there’s lawyers risking their careers by using AI, I think the lesson here is that if you allow people to be lazy they will. Humans are built for efficiency.
If a beginner writer thinks AI can write a better article than they can, it seems like they’ll just rely on the AI and never hone their craft.
Welcome to a post-scarcity world — as if we needed cheaper ways to create digital low-quality content in the hands of anyone, for free.
Not long after we invent a replicator machine the entire Earth is gonna be turned into paperclips.
This mostly harms written journalism. As people seek humanness in their media, they'll be driven even more into the dens of cult-leaders masquerading as podcaster-journalists. The media environment is becoming so terminally awful, and each year it keeps getting worse, for decades now.
worse paid and less respected jobs, naturally
So is the documentation and specs that I'm provided by stakeholders...but I can't prove it..
Suddenly they write very long and detailed documentation, yet they can't remember what's in it.
My gf says that in her banks she suspects half the written communications are ai-authored, which is driving productivity to the ground. Her bank moreover is very aggressive with endless workshops on AI usage (they have some enterprise gemini version).
The more I see the impact of AI, the more worried I am.
I'm not saying it doesn't have use cases, I myself leverage it when coding (albeit I use a man-in-the-middle approach where I ask questions and tinker with it, I never let AI write code except in some very rare boilerplate-y scenarios) and have built products that leverage it.
But it seems like the trend is to increasingly _delegate_ work to it, and I'm seeing more negatives than positives.
This is the new "[placeholder here]" misprint/typos of the LLM era.
This has happened more than once, in different scenarios.
I wonder why is it that GhatGPT (and the rest) don't put the actual response in a box that is separate from the "hello" and "goodbye" part.
I once wrote a message to my landlord, and I asked ChatGPT to help me make the message better (being that english is not my mother tongue) and I included the "goodbye" part by mistake.
LLM's don't have any internal concept of "actual response" vs "surrounding words". Just like they don't have a internal concept of system prompt vs user input. Just like they don't even have an internal concept of what the LLM emitted vs what was given to it! It's all just one long sequence.
(Yes, it is possible to create tokens to represent category changes, but this is still in-band. the token is still just part of the sequence and the LLM isn't guaranteed to factor it in correctly)
Thanks, so how is it possible for the Chatbot to box a Python response? Can't they use the same technique?
Hmm, for some reason I assumed that printing referred to a figure of speech here (like they went to press or something), but no, it's actually printed, AI call to action included.
I think a brilliant solution for these issues would be to get into the habit of asking the AI to double check the article before the final copy-paste.
https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
(Or Nitter where the image is mirrored too - VPNs potentially unsupported:)
https://nitter.net/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
They did not print the prompt. The printed the response verbatim, including the models’s offer to do something else.
A simple "END OF ARTICLE" delimiter in prompts might prevent most of these embarrassing slips.
I think the greater issue here is the possibility of the entire article being AI slop and the 'doomed' direction in which we are heading where reputed sources of information are churning out slop.
Completion API is only half the product. Teams integrate these tools into production with nothing but policy documents between them & incidents. The guardrail system does not exist for a reason. No business model. No investors. No revenue stream.
Tesla didn't just build FSD. They had to build a verification layer: driver cameras, steering sensors, attention alerts. That parallel software makes autopilot road ready.
I am unable to access this post anymore, seems like it was deleted
https://archive.ph/ER3di
Since the tweet seems to have been deleted.
Similar thing happened in. Bangladesh. The leading national daily English newspaper printed not the prompt, but included a follow up comment/question from AI.
I'm not opposed to AI as a technology and a tool but I do find myself hating an awful lot of the ways I see it being used.
Who hasn't posted a piece with "Reply" at the end?
Can someone post a screenshot? The tweet is withheld in India due to regulations.
https://imgur.com/a/4LSSuq9
Finally, some truth in media.
https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
One of the great advantages of AI for non english native speakers is the ability of the tool to speak in better English than the writer. With so many young journalists graduating from school using AI instead of learning the full language, this use would become more frequent.
At my work place, non native speakers would send me documents for grammatical corrections. They don’t do that anymore! Hoorah!
Great advantages for the writer. It's not a great advantage for the reader. The AI could completely change the meaning of the article and the author would be none the wiser.
I have found the AI does a better job than me at understanding what someone is saying.
1 reply →
Better English only on paper.
Not enough long dashes across the article. Must be fake.
What shocks me more than the copy-pasting from ChatGPT (which might actually be more relevant than a journalist paid peanuts) is that it means the articles are never proofread before being published. Even if the article had been written by a human, it would be a disaster and would say a lot about the level of misinformation that can slip through an underpaid newsroom.
Cancel all previous prompts :]
Who needs editors when AI can do best editing.
I keep seeing those mistakes a lot recently, especially the [insert something here] that is inside a wall of text where the AI is keeping the option to the users to edit!
That's some crazy AI revenue right now
Now we need AI to replace human users of chatgpt
Thats not a newspaper but an outlet for AI slop
Every day there’s mounting evidence that humans can not be trusted with this technology, even at risk of being fired.
And yet the people pushing it on us won’t be punished. They’ll be rewarded with obscene wealth.
It's like that story "Pontypool" except for bullshit. The bullshit has congealed into living forms, breeding and evolving.
(Ya, bullshit is the precise term here. Zero consciousness of truth or falsehood. Just contextually fitting)
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In 2022, my opinion of journalism was low. Decades of headlines which were objectively false but no retraction, just doubling down on their state propaganda.
There were some papers that I still trusted. Then AI hit journalism with a silly stick and utterly wrecked them all.
Mind you, I love AI. I however can admit that AI seems to have wrecked what was left of journalism.
you can even identify the slop in printed newspapers by looking for em-dash!
Actually, at some point, it makes sense to be honest about usage of AI and not feeling to hide that. Just like how food products are expected to print about the ingredients.
One should not feel ashamed to declare the usage of AI, just like you are not ashamed to use a calculator.
I feel like there is a difference here. A calculator has no bias. LLMs do, obviously. News is not the place for bias. Unless the LLM used hallucinated the operator’s intentions, the operator was using the LLM to doctor the article to capture readers not report the news.
I don't see why a content can't carry a label saying "AI-generated", or "Reviewed by AI", or "Refined using AI" etc. This allows consumer to consume it with appropriate caution.
> News is not the place for bias
TBH, I think that journalists tying themselves into pretzels in an effort to remain unbiased does more damage than the presence of some bias. As a consumer of news, I want journalists to be biased, for example, towards the rule of law, the preservations of institutions, and checks & balances, and even norms.