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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 =)
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.
That doesn't help GPT-5; it /really/ wants to suggest follow-ups and ignored me telling it not to.
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
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
Claude code already does this, it'll present a series of questions with pre-set answers, and the opportunity to answer "custom: <free text>"
Why do you respond to its prompting? It's a machine
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.
Try one-shotting. Rather than a continuous conversation, refine your initial prompt and restart.
Occasionally I find it helpful, but it would be good to have the option to remove it from the context.
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.
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.
Obviously the solution is to use AI to extract the raw data from their AI generated fluff.
It's like the opposite of compression.
>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.
At least in the case of Bloomberg they would like you to pay for that raw data. That's their bread and butter.
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>
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...
https://www.wired.com/story/wordsmith-robot-journalist-downl... https://archive.ph/gSdmbAnd 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.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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
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.
Only Pakistanis knew from where the Dawn newspaper is, so the current title is more informative
It doesn't matter much in which country it is located actually. It also provides less information.
How does including the country of origin provide less information than omitting it?
Does omitting the brand provide more information? Newspaper brand is more relevant than the country.
>” 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.
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>
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!
Now you're thinking like a *real investigative journalist*
Oh God, doubling down on it like crazy.
Would you like me to provide a brief summary of notable events in print media like this?
"Would you like me to break this down for you in a table format?
> 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
It’s not about A, it’s about B.
And here’s the kicker – …
That wasn’t a journalist, it was an LLM. But they forgot to add the prompt.
no shit, Sherlock! ;-)
If only Sherlock didn’t get sherlocked…
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!
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
compared to the writing yourself???? absolutely not
It was sarcastic.
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...>
Your example is not passive voice.
Yes, they are pointing out how it should have been written.
Apparently not.
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.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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.
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.
"We regrets that mistakes were noticed."
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.
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?
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.
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.
how so, any examples
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.
exactly what we're trending towards.
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.
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.
Soon whole world will be fluent in impeccable American English, but only on paper.
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.
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.
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
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
This is the new "[placeholder here]" misprint/typos of the LLM era.
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.
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
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?
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.
Finally, some truth in media.
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.
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?
Maybe the one doing the final check also uses chatgpt :)
Can someone post a screenshot? The tweet is withheld in India due to regulations.
https://imgur.com/a/4LSSuq9
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.
Hilarious.
However - same prompt would have different output each time is yet another caveat.
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.
https://xcancel.com/omar_quraishi/status/1988518627859951986
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!
Similar thing happened in. Bangladesh. The leading national daily English newspaper printed not the prompt, but included a follow up comment/question from AI.
https://archive.ph/ER3di
Since the tweet seems to have been deleted.
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.
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.
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.
How do you know
Better English only on paper.
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.
I am unable to access this post anymore, seems like it was deleted
Who hasn't posted a piece with "Reply" at the end?
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.
Not enough long dashes across the article. Must be fake.
Who needs editors when AI can do best editing.
That's some crazy AI revenue right now
Sometimes Cheating require Brains
Cancel all previous prompts :]
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)
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.
Now we need AI to replace human users of chatgpt
Thats not a newspaper but an outlet for AI slop
[dead]
[flagged]
you can even identify the slop in printed newspapers by looking for em-dash!
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.
> 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.
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.