He "fell into the trap of hallucinations". Yeah, maybe we need to stop pretending people who ask LLM to slop their work for them are victims.

"Look, the robot found an irresistible quote, how could I not use it?!" That's great journalism for you.

The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.

Just in case if you want to know which outlets are affected.

The quotes from his apology post sound like they were written by an LLM too IMO 🙀

“I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless – it was wrong,” Vandermeersch wrote in a Substack post headlined “I am admitting my mistake”.

I don't believe hallucination is the correct word when the AI is using algorithms to keep customers addicted and happy. I suggest this is the very same problem that Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg, and others have been doing from the start. AI is just branding, and the same addictive algorithms are applied to the public in unregulated fashion. Only difference is the branding is selling a story that AI is actually some kind of entity with the expectation of fantastic competence.

I'm sorry to say, it's incredibly competent at making fools of us.

Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.

Nice self-victimization. AI doesn’t set traps. The terms he’s looking for include “sloppiness”, “laziness”, and “unprofessionalism”.

He doesn’t deserve to be suspended. He deserves to be fired.

The fact that they mention "de Telegraaf" makes me think of course it is that paper, bunch of right wing wankers where the facts don't matter, only the outrage.