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Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:
The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to
hallucinateget something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.
Yes all humans made mistakes. But in this case the humans caught the error and corrected it, even before someone archived the wrong copy.
That's something AI slop can't do.
Anyways AI slop hallucinates at rates far far higher than human journalists. My challenge from the last thread still stands, just make an ai prompt that reliably creates bland copywritten news articles without hallucinations.
You're talking about Doug Saunders? And not the Canadian Press, Toronto Star, Global News, Globe and Mail, or Duane Bratt?
I don't put much stock in corrections, even ignoring the speed and prevalence. If you depend on corrections to fix errors, then you've committed to either ignoring every headline you see in favor of a delayed summary, or else tracking each news story and following up after the appropriate amount of time to check for any changes.
How long am I supposed to wait before a non-breaking news story becomes reliable? If you choose to give them four years, then you might still be disappointed.
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I for one do not sit refreshing the fake news frontpage and most articles I read are somewhat aged.
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
Edit:
They did not retract this article because it's not strictly false: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-emlúps-te-secwépemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778 The are re-reporting what the indigenous group falsely claimed, but did not ever make a statement of fact that there were actually bodies there.
Nevertheless, they actually provided a correction after the fact at the top of the article that says there were no bodies discovered:
I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.
Hmm point taken. That's certainly not ideal.
The articles only reported that the first nations claimed that bodies exist. The articles never claimed themselves that the bodies exist, so the articles are not technically false. Nevertheless, CBC still was gracious enough to update the article and write front and center that there were no bodies, which is not something that they had to do at all, yet they did anyways. What more do you want CBC to do before you will be happy?
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
And yes, journalists should all be minecrafted, but that doesn't mean they're technically wrong, they're just evil conniving cunts.
I was printing off copies of the article every day back when it first came out because I didn't trust the correction notices. Over about 4 days the article got softer and softer with no notice of correction provided. It went from "human remains" to "GPR hits" to "possible graves". It was only like 6 months later, after the GPR company publicly said "we never said they were remains," that the CBC started saying "sites of concern."
Note that their articles announcing actual excavations that have turned up nothing, they preface the story with "This article contains disturbing details," which is tipping the hand a little.
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