Our newsroom AI policy

AI is in danger of peeing in it's own water source. It's unbelievably useful at imitating and generating content, but it needs enough original content to be able to train and scrape.

Google got one thing wrong and nearly destroyed the internet - people need to have an incentive to contribute content online, and that incentive should not be to game the system for advertising.

This in particular dawned on me when asking Claude for instructions in taking apart my dryer. There was literally only one webpage on the internet left with instructions for my particular dryer - the page was more or less unusable with rotten links and riddled with adware. Claude did it's best but filled in the missing diagrams with hallucinations.

I was imaging if LLMs could finally solve the micropayments solution people have always proposed for the internet. Part of my monthly payment gets split between all of the sites that the LLM scraped knowledge. Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.

It might not be a lot of money, but it would certainly be more than the pitiful ad revenue you get from posting content online right now. And if I want to upload corrected instructions for repairing this dryer I would have reason to.

Self-contradictory policy.

> Reporters may use AI tools vetted and approved for our workflow to assist with research, including navigating large volumes of material, summarizing background documents, and searching datasets.

If this is their official policy, Ars Technica bears as much responsibility as the author they fired for the fabricated reporting. LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention.

You cannot permit your employees to use LLMs in this manner and then tell them it's entirely their fault when it makes mistakes, because you gave them permission to use something that will make mistakes 100% without fail. My takeaway from this is to never trust anything that Ars reports because their policy is to rely on plausible generated fictional research and their solution to getting caught is to fire employees rather than taking accountability for doing actual research.

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Edit: Two replies have found complaint with the fact that I didn't quote the following sentence, so here you go:

> Even then, AI output is never treated as an authoritative source. Everything must be verified.

If I wasn't clear, I consider this to be part of what makes the policy self-contradictory. In my eyes, this is equivalent to providing all of your employees with a flamethrower, and then saying they bear all responsibility for the fires they start. "Hey, don't blame us for giving them flamethrowers, it's company policy not to burn everything to the ground!". Rather than firing the flamethrower-wielding employees when the inevitable burning happens, maybe don't give them flamethrowers.

AI policy with AI usage is always difficult to write/read. Lengthy, frontloaded with excuses, values, and big words, followed by more words to fill the gap between sliced up ugly truth.

AI policy without AI usage is easy to read and write.

> We don't use them. That's it.

From TFA:

> Our approach comes from two convictions:

Uhuh.

> that AI cannot replace human insight, creativity, and ingenuity

Sure, agreed, no dispute.

> and that these tools, used well, can help professionals do better work.

[[citation needed]]

Prove it. I don't believe you.

Related discussions from a couple months ago:

Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes (606 points, 394 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226608

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations (308 points, 211 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071

\1 AI-generated news is unhuman slop. Crikey is banning it (2024) - Crikey.com.au - https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/06/24/crikey-insider-artifici...

\2 Why Crikey retracted an article that we found out was written with AI help (2026) - https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/03/19/crikey-responds-to-ai-c...

  Yesterday, we published an article by a contributor who later confirmed they used AI in some aspects of its production.

  This goes against our editorial policies. As a result, we’ve taken down the story and the preceding three stories in the series.

(\2) is an interesting follow on from the policy set two years earlier (\1) as the specific piece in question "used AI in some aspects of its production" but was largely very much a human conceived, shaped and written piece that was only "assisted" by AI.

The Australian Media Watch team looked at this tension closely and felt the rejection was unfair, pointing out that while slop is bad, assistance (subject to terms and conditions) can enhance.

- Media Watch, likely geolocked to AU, might need a proxy - https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/ep-08/106487250

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven.

How is this different from anyone else publishing AI slop images on their blog? Those people also direct the AI through prompting and evaluate the results.

I mean, use AI images, so long as they are not crap, but why keep up this charade of "we're authoring the slop".

I have had that feeling for a while and Ars had some high-profile slipups over the past few months. This confirms that it is just slop now :(

> Our creative team may use AI tools in the production of certain visual material, but the creative direction and editorial judgment are human-driven.

As opposed to what? This is a little facetious, but what could it possibly mean to have creative direction and editorial judgement without human involvement?

Presumably we're talking about image generated by a diffusion model or something, but further, an image which is generated without being edited by any human. The prompt used to generate the image isn't written by a human, and it can't really be based on the contents of the (human authored and edited) article either. No human may select the service or model used, and once generated the image is published sight unseen without being reviewed by any human.

If some kind of agentic AI does any of these things it is one which appears ex nihilo, spontaneously appearing without being created or directed by any human.

Context:

"An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.

...

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

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.

...

Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes" [1].

[1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

Trust, reputation, and credibility will become (even more of) a premium.

Good to know which companies/news to avoid.

Doesn't need Ars Technica added to the title

It is nice to see, but I fear it will be the same as with papers and their news and internet. I could buy a paper and read it but why would I?

The same will most likely happen with human written news and cheap AI slop news. Why would anyone pay more for higher quality when you can have low quality cheap product?

Look at food for example. Price is most important factor in the choice of what you are going to buy. I will probably not happen now, in few months or in even few years but it will happen if models will still be advancing.

[dead]

> Anyone who uses AI tools in our editorial workflow is responsible for the accuracy and integrity of the resulting work. This responsibility cannot be transferred to colleagues, editors...

This sounds a direct callout to the incident earlier this year where an apparently sick staff member relied on an AI to reproduce quotes, and it did not. Ars retracted the article and the staffmember was fired.

I have felt very ethically uneasy about this because the person was ill, and I emailed the Ars editorial team directly to express concern re labour conditions, and to note that it is the editorial team's responsibility to do things like check quotes.

Of course it is the journalist's responsibility: when you have a job you do your job by policy (I wonder if this policy existed in writing at the time of the firing?) plus, it is part of the job to be accurate. But I am also a firm believer in responsibility being greater at higher levels. This sounds a direct abrogation of journalistic standards by the Ars editorial team.