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Pakistani newspaper mistakenly prints AI prompt with the article(twitter.com)
533 points by wg0 4 days ago | 179 comments
  • chrismorgan4 days ago

    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.

    • abdullahkhalids4 days ago |parent

      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?

      • pseudony4 days ago |parent

        Maybe the model just wasn’t multi-modal back then ;)

      • IAmBroom4 days ago |parent

        Because it was BS opinion, dressed in scientifical sounding clothing?

    • layer84 days ago |parent

      The AI is prompting the human here, so the title isn't strictly wrong. ;)

      • dwringer4 days ago |parent

        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.

        • tharkun__3 days ago |parent

          In similar "news" Re: tangents, I've noticed Claude now suddenly starting to give up on problem analyses. After like three rounds of it trying to figure something out that I told it is a requirement, it suggests that we don't need to do that as it's a nice-to-have only anyway. If in auto-accept mode it'll start doing the other thing even. I have to catch it and tell it to not effing give up so easily and to stop giving me BS excuses turning hard requirements (literally the reason we're doing what we're doing) into a nice-to-have it can skip.

          I guess they recently re-trained on too many "perpetual junior senior dev" stuff.

          • theshrike793 days ago |parent

            For me Claude keeps claiming that it's fine that 100 of the 350 integration tests broke, because "it's not relevant to this".

            I had to specifically instruct it that the integration tests ALWAYS pass 100% and not to assume anything - and it kinda believed it.

            The nuclear option would be to force it to start with running the tests to prove to itself they worked before =)

        • lubujackson3 days ago |parent

          Add "Complete this request as a single task and do not ask any follow-up questions." Or some variation of that. They keep screwing with default behavior, but you can explicitly direct the LLM to override it.

          • astrange3 days ago |parent

            That doesn't help GPT-5; it /really/ wants to suggest follow-ups and ignored me telling it not to.

        • elxr3 days ago |parent

          This is why I wish chat UI's had separate categories of chats (like a few generic system prompts) that let you do more back-and-forth style discussions, or more "answers only" without adding any extra noise, or even an "exploration"/"tangent" slider.

          The fact that system prompts / custom instructions have to be typed-in in every major LM chat UI is a missed opportunity IMO

        • Razengan4 days ago |parent

          I think AI should present those continuation prompts as dynamic buttons, like "Summarize", "Yes, explain more" etc. based on the AI's last message, like the NPC conversation dialogs in some RPGs

          • xnorswap4 days ago |parent

            Claude code already does this, it'll present a series of questions with pre-set answers, and the opportunity to answer "custom: <free text>"

        • butlike4 days ago |parent

          Why do you respond to its prompting? It's a machine

          • dwringer4 days ago |parent

            Because if I don't, it tends to misinterpret the next thing I say because it reads that as an answer to the question it just asked me.

            • catlifeonmars4 days ago |parent

              Try one-shotting. Rather than a continuous conversation, refine your initial prompt and restart.

        • layer84 days ago |parent

          Occasionally I find it helpful, but it would be good to have the option to remove it from the context.

          • drivers994 days ago |parent

            You can if you script the request yourself, or you could have a front end that lets you cut out those paragraphs from the conversation. I only say that because yesterday I followed this guide: https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/ except I had to figure out how to do it with Gemini API instead. The context is always just (essentially) a list of strings (or "parts" anyway, doesn't have to be strings) that you pass back to the model so you can make the context whatever you like. It shouldn't be too hard to make a frontend that lets you edit the context, and fairly easy to mock up if you just put the request in a script that you add to.

      • chrismorgan4 days ago |parent

        I have decided to call it engagement bait.

    • michaelbuckbee4 days ago |parent

      For years, both the financial and sports news sides of things have generated increasingly templated "articles", this just feels like the latest iteration.

      • dredmorbius4 days ago |parent

        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.

        • RobotToaster4 days ago |parent

          Obviously the solution is to use AI to extract the raw data from their AI generated fluff.

          It's like the opposite of compression.

          • mh-4 days ago |parent

            >It's like the opposite of compression.

            I believe the word is depression, which seems apt when thinking of the idea of people using AI to make content longer and then the readers all using AI to make it shorter again.

        • jrjeksjd8d4 days ago |parent

          At least in the case of Bloomberg they would like you to pay for that raw data. That's their bread and butter.

          • dredmorbius4 days ago |parent

            True.

            But there's the approach the Economist takes. For many decades, it's relied on a three-legged revenue model: subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke consulting and research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). My understanding is that revenues are split roughly evenly amongst these, and that they tend to even out cash-flow throughout economic cycles (advertising is famously pro-cyclical, subscriptions and analysis somewhat less so).

            To that extent, the graphs and maps the Economist actually does include in its articles (as well as many of its "special reports") are both teasers and loss-leader marketing for EIU services. I believe that many of the special reports arise out of EIU research.

            <https://www.eiu.com/n/>

            <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit>

      • shagie4 days ago |parent

        https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...

            ...
            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.
        
        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

            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.
        • simonw4 days ago |parent

          I like Quakebot as an example of how to do this kind of thing ethically and with integrity: https://www.latimes.com/people/quakebot

          > Quakebot is a software application developed by the Los Angeles Times to report the latest earthquakes as fast as possible. The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey and, if they meet certain criteria, automatically generates a draft article. The newsroom is alerted and, if a Times editor determines the post is newsworthy, the report is published.

          • mschuster913 days ago |parent

            > The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey

            Probably a service that is provided to the general public for free, similar to NOAA and weather data - so chances are rather high it ends up on the chopping block or for-money only.

      • mlmonkey4 days ago |parent

        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.

      • jerf4 days ago |parent

        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.

      • 4 days ago |parent
        [deleted]
      • reaperducer4 days ago |parent

        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.

      • cantor_S_drug4 days ago |parent

        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.

      • the__alchemist4 days ago |parent

        Both categories are and have-been bottom-feeder copy, and have been prior to the prevalence of LLMs.

    • kleene_op4 days ago |parent

      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.

    • SoftTalker3 days ago |parent

      > 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.

    • wg04 days ago |parent

      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.

      • nashashmi4 days ago |parent

        It might be better to mention “Dawn newspaper” instead of “Pakistani newspaper”.

        • wg03 days ago |parent

          Nobody outside Pakistan knows Dawn even though it is the newspaper that was founded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (considered founding father of the nation) and one of the largest and most prestigious as well.

          • nashashmi3 days ago |parent

            It is like the NYT for the country. But the relevant detail here is the printing of the prompt in a nationally recognized newspaper. The brand, as local as it maybe, still provides more context than some random newspaper in a foreign country would.

            And I have ran into Dawn newspaper on google news frontpage several times, usually on entertainment stuff.

        • nomdep4 days ago |parent

          Only Pakistanis knew from where the Dawn newspaper is, so the current title is more informative

          • rat99884 days ago |parent

            It doesn't matter much in which country it is located actually. It also provides less information.

            • mh-4 days ago |parent

              How does including the country of origin provide less information than omitting it?

              • nashashmi3 days ago |parent

                Does omitting the brand provide more information? Newspaper brand is more relevant than the country.

                • 3 days ago |parent
                  [deleted]
    • lawlessone3 days ago |parent

      >” 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.

    • righthand4 days ago |parent

      I think AI-Prompt is synonymous with the chat before an LLM prints the intended garbage.

      • chrismorgan4 days ago |parent

        The prompt is the chat before it prints the intended garbage. This is the engagement bait the LLM appends after the intended garbage.

    • xhkkffbf4 days ago |parent

      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.

  • ineedasername4 days ago

    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…”

    • kilroy1234 days ago |parent

      That's a sharp comment–let's break down why that is.

      • threatripper3 days ago |parent

        Let's reiterate what a comment is.

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        Let's give some unrelated examples of popular comments.

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        <Continue Reading>

    • sph4 days ago |parent

      Now I’ll have to look out for news posts that have a question in the title and begin with “Great question!”

      • mh-4 days ago |parent

        A new twist on Betteridge's law.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

      • hagbarth4 days ago |parent

        "You're absolutely right!"

    • hmokiguess4 days ago |parent

      You’re absolutely right!

    • porridgeraisin4 days ago |parent

      Now you're thinking like a *real investigative journalist*

    • johnisgood4 days ago |parent

      Oh God, doubling down on it like crazy.

    • sidewndr464 days ago |parent

      Would you like me to provide a brief summary of notable events in print media like this?

    • complianceowl4 days ago |parent

      "Would you like me to break this down for you in a table format?

      • 4 days ago |parent
        [deleted]
    • visarga4 days ago |parent

      > 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

      • DANmode3 days ago |parent

        It’s not about A, it’s about B.

    • ares6233 days ago |parent

      And here’s the kicker – …

    • 4 days ago |parent
      [deleted]
    • tempodox4 days ago |parent

      That wasn’t a journalist, it was an LLM. But they forgot to add the prompt.

      • jones891764 days ago |parent

        no shit, Sherlock! ;-)

        • mrexroada day ago |parent

          If only Sherlock didn’t get sherlocked…

  • bschne4 days ago

    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-...

    • dredmorbius4 days ago |parent

      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>.

      • roflmaostc4 days ago |parent

        I still think someone should have done this as a pun and get your paper trending everywhere.

    • kavith4 days ago |parent

      Fair play to them for owning up to their mistake, and not just pretending like it didn't happen!

      • constantcrying4 days ago |parent

        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.

      • yard20104 days ago |parent

        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.

        • phkahler4 days ago |parent

          >> Just say that chatgpt wrote the article and no one read it before publishing

          This is so interesting. I wonder if no human prompted for the article to be written either. I could see some kind of algorithm figuring out what to "write" about and prompting AI to create the articles automatically. Those are the jobs that are actually being replaced by AI - writing fluff crap to build an attention trap for ad revenue.

          • Cthulhu_4 days ago |parent

            Very likely this already happens on slop websites (...which I can't name because I don't go there), which for example just republish press releases (which could be considered aggregation sites I guess), or which automatically scrape Reddit and translate them into listicles on the fly.

      • CGamesPlay4 days ago |parent

        Maybe, although I'm a bit doubtful that they were 100% honest.

        > Entgegen unseren Standards

      • bonesss4 days ago |parent

        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.

        • tonyhart74 days ago |parent

          compared to the writing yourself???? absolutely not

          • IAmBroom4 days ago |parent

            It was sarcastic.

      • reaperducer4 days ago |parent

        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.

    • IAmBroom4 days ago |parent

      "We regret to admit that our editors don't actually take the time to read these articles before hitting the PUBLISH button..."

      • SoftTalker3 days ago |parent

        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.

      • Cthulhu_4 days ago |parent

        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).

  • FatalLogic4 days ago

    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

    • nicbou4 days ago |parent

      > The violation of AI policy is regretted.

      That's a good example of when you shouldn't use passive voice.

      • dredmorbius4 days ago |parent

        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...>

        • strix_varius4 days ago |parent

          Your example is not passive voice.

          • IAmBroom4 days ago |parent

            Yes, they are pointing out how it should have been written.

            • strix_varius2 days ago |parent

              Apparently not.

      • vintermann4 days ago |parent

        On the other hand, this way you know they probably didn't use the chatbot to write the apology.

      • pixelpoet4 days ago |parent

        > This door is alarmed

      • throwaway6386374 days ago |parent

        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.

        • hbarka4 days ago |parent

          It’s still passive voice, the kind used when trying to avoid blame or responsibility. So pretty much fits in bureaucratic places.

          That’s just…mistakes were made.

          • throwup2384 days ago |parent

            This pattern of writing goes back to the Spanish conquistadors at the very least. They frequently described their actions in a passive voice when doing something they knew was horrible, only to switch to aggrandizing active voice when writing about their successes. It’s a standard way to blur responsibility and present violence as an almost natural “fact” rather than a deliberate action by identifiable agents.

            It didn’t escape everyone’s attention though. Bartolomé de las Casas definitely noticed it.

          • 4 days ago |parent
            [deleted]
        • thoroughburro4 days ago |parent

          > That's just a manner of speaking in former British colonies, or at least the subcontinent.

          Which is still a good example of when you shouldn't use passive voice.

          Clarifying where “optimising language to evade a responsibility” evolved does nothing to justify it, which you imply with “that’s just”.

      • benterix4 days ago |parent

        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.

        • serial_dev4 days ago |parent

          They don't regret serving you AI slop, they regret that the "writer" didn't even read their own article and that they got caught because of it.

          • IAmBroom4 days ago |parent

            "We regrets that mistakes were noticed."

      • steve_taylor4 days ago |parent

        It's a good example of when you should use AI.

    • elwebmaster4 days ago |parent

      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.

  • guytv4 days ago

    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?

    • yoyohello134 days ago |parent

      One interesting thing about the LLM era is it really highlights what things in life actually add value.

      • amrocha4 days ago |parent

        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?

        • yoyohello133 days ago |parent

          My experience, AI has shown me that a lot of stuff I do online. Watching videos, reading random articles, is mostly vapid pointless nonsense.

          AI slop has finally woken me up and I am prioritizing IRL activities with friends and family, or activities more in the real world like miniature painting, piano, etc. It's made me much more selective with what activities I engage in, because getting sucked in to the endless AI miasma isn't what I want for my life.

          • amrocha3 days ago |parent

            That’s awesome, really happy to hear that!

            Personally I still haven’t run into slop in long form video format, but it’s definitely concerning.

      • moneywoes4 days ago |parent

        how so, any examples

        • mrexroada day ago |parent

          Personally, it’s highlighted the value of physical books and helped me spend less time getting sucked into rabbit holes on devices. I’ve been much more deliberate about what text I choose to read. Been burning through classics that have been on my shelf for decades.

    • volkk4 days ago |parent

      exactly what we're trending towards.

    • visarga4 days ago |parent

      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.

      • latexr4 days ago |parent

        > 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.

        • LEDThereBeLighta day ago |parent

          It doesn’t matter whether it’s wrong as long as the ideas it comes up with are good or interesting, which they often are.

  • robofanatic4 days ago

    Soon whole world will be fluent in impeccable American English, but only on paper.

    • kevin_thibedeau4 days ago |parent

      Pretty easy to condition a prompt with regional idioms and spellyngs.

      • jerf4 days ago |parent

        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.

    • creaturemachine4 days ago |parent

      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.

  • Netcob4 days ago

    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.

    • throw_await4 days ago |parent

      I would be happy to read boring facts without the fluff

  • forinti4 days ago

    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!

    • stillworks4 days ago |parent

      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.

    • serial_dev4 days ago |parent

      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.

    • butlike4 days ago |parent

      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.

      • amrocha4 days ago |parent

        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.

    • sph4 days ago |parent

      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.

      • energy1234 days ago |parent

        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.

    • roywiggins4 days ago |parent

      worse paid and less respected jobs, naturally

  • chii4 days ago

    This is the new "[placeholder here]" misprint/typos of the LLM era.

  • epolanski4 days ago

    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.

  • Barbing4 days ago

    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

  • kwanbix3 days ago

    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.

    • advisedwang3 days ago |parent

      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)

      • kwanbix3 days ago |parent

        Thanks, so how is it possible for the Chatbot to box a Python response? Can't they use the same technique?

        • zahlman3 days ago |parent

          My understanding is: the training induces it to put Python code inside Markdown code fences, which the app interprets. It does that because the training data is full of examples of people doing that, because when people post Python code online it's very commonly in contexts where Markdown is understood that way.

          ... I suppose they could train the LLM to put a Markdown horizontal rule in the right place, but it sounds harder to get the system prompt to care about details like that consistently.

  • mikkupikku4 days ago

    Finally, some truth in media.

  • indigoabstract3 days ago

    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.

  • t1234s3 days ago

    The funny thing is not that they are using an agent to fluff up their articles but that no one is doing a final read checking anything before it goes to press.

    Could this be a mistake or intentional from a disgruntled writer?

    • mk893 days ago |parent

      Maybe the one doing the final check also uses chatgpt :)

  • sidcool4 days ago

    Can someone post a screenshot? The tweet is withheld in India due to regulations.

    • latexr4 days ago |parent

      https://imgur.com/a/4LSSuq9

  • vismit20003 days ago

    As the pioneers in the field say - prompts are as important as output and must be preserved and published along with code/output! Don't throw away your prompts.

    • wg03 days ago |parent

      Hilarious.

      However - same prompt would have different output each time is yet another caveat.

  • 4 days ago
    [deleted]
  • tao_oat3 days ago

    I've been trying to get ChatGPT to stop adding this kind of fluff to its responses through custom instructions, but to no avail! It's one of the more frustrating parts of it, IMO.

  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt4 days ago

    https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986

  • tamimio4 days ago

    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!

  • esalman4 days ago

    Similar thing happened in. Bangladesh. The leading national daily English newspaper printed not the prompt, but included a follow up comment/question from AI.

  • ksynwa4 days ago

    https://archive.ph/ER3di

    Since the tweet seems to have been deleted.

  • sharkjacobs4 days ago

    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.

  • Nifty39293 days ago

    They did not print the prompt. The printed the response verbatim, including the models’s offer to do something else.

  • LeicaLatte3 days ago

    A simple "END OF ARTICLE" delimiter in prompts might prevent most of these embarrassing slips.

    • bojle3 days ago |parent

      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.

      • LeicaLatte3 days ago |parent

        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.

  • nashashmi4 days ago

    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!

    • leoedin4 days ago |parent

      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.

      • nashashmi4 days ago |parent

        I have found the AI does a better job than me at understanding what someone is saying.

        • throw_await3 days ago |parent

          How do you know

    • robofanatic4 days ago |parent

      Better English only on paper.

  • sombragris3 days ago

    In my country, last Sunday there were extraordinary city elections in a major city, and the ruling party lost. Almost all major newspapers carried headlines, all of them speaking that the ruling party suffered a "beating" (paliza). In our colloquial context, using that word is not that common, and it was something akin to the proverbial em dash: a telltale sign of AI slop used by all newspapers. Sad, but true.

  • irilesscent3 days ago

    I am unable to access this post anymore, seems like it was deleted

  • visarga4 days ago

    Who hasn't posted a piece with "Reply" at the end?

  • xzjis4 days ago

    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.

  • vedmakk4 days ago

    Not enough long dashes across the article. Must be fake.

  • robofanatic4 days ago

    Who needs editors when AI can do best editing.

  • nextworddev4 days ago

    That's some crazy AI revenue right now

  • MahendraRao3 days ago

    Sometimes Cheating require Brains

  • Pocomon4 days ago

    Cancel all previous prompts :]

  • analog83744 days ago

    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)

  • amrocha4 days ago

    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.

  • thumbsup-_-4 days ago

    Now we need AI to replace human users of chatgpt

  • grugagag4 days ago

    Thats not a newspaper but an outlet for AI slop

  • Adnoxy3 days ago

    [dead]

  • sammy22554 days ago

    [flagged]

  • blibble4 days ago

    you can even identify the slop in printed newspapers by looking for em-dash!

  • incomingpain4 days ago

    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.

  • zkmon4 days ago

    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.

    • c0wb0yc0d3r4 days ago |parent

      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.

      • pohl4 days ago |parent

        > 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.

      • zkmon3 days ago |parent

        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.