Comment by hluska
10 days ago
I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:
1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.
2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.
3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.
I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.
That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.
As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
I think there's still something missing here. This is a strange place for ChatGPT to confabulate quotes: extracting short quotes from a short text blog post is about easy as it gets these days. GPT-5.2 Pro can handle tens of thousands of words for me before I start to notice any small omissions or confabulations, and this was confabulating all that at just 1.5k words?
So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.