Did The Absolute Sound use an AI chatbot to review the Soulution 717 monoblock amp?

Sounds like AI to me, but what do I know.  I’m only a 3rd generation bot.

This is our future. It’s schlock. 

I met Harry last night should I be worried? Screw ai I'd still like to have the amps.enjoy the music and the reviews

No, TAS did not publish an AI review.

Someone simply made a completely false claim on Reddit about this and most of the board over there ran with it. Here too, apparently. 🙄😒

In any case, whoever looked at it only saw the website version of the article. I imagine whoever maintains the website made this error, while anyone who has the print version (or digitally subscribes thru Zinio) knows that this bull**** is completely false.

So, I wrote Robert (Harley) and he wrote back. He  was quite adamant that AI is OUT at TAS. The email states: "I can assure you that none of us uses AI to write in the magazine. In fact, we abhor the use of AI in writing.  I wrote an editorial a few months ago, saying that we would never use AI to create text."

I already knew this, as I had written for TAS in the late 80s and 90s, know the magazine well and know Jonathan and had seen the editorial on using AI several months ago. Jonathan loves writing (he’s a creative guy), and had written  detective novels before coming to TAS. It would be obvious to anyone who knew him that he hadn’t done any such thing.

Nonetheless, I wanted to simply observe how people would react to any old blind item, completely speculative with absolutely NO evidence to support it. Not one shred. Merely ’speculation,’ which people then repeat as though it is "fact." If I’d even thought of doing this when I was a detective, many decades ago, I would fully have expected my boss to fire me on the spot. What’s disturbing is how fast others are to show their ignorance by not asking a single question.

What Carl Sagan said in  his 1995 book, "The Dumbing Down of America" has now come to pass. He foresaw the lack of critical thinking. He was correct and we’ve arrived at that point. I think we ’arrived’ in 2011.

It is disturbing how people to not mind embarrassing themselves with unsubstantiated gossip. All it takes is one idiot making a false claim, and people chime in, following like a herd of sheep. I’d be embarrassed to show my utter lack of critical thinking, but others seem not to mind displaying their ignorance. 

This is akin to the Chinese fable named "Three Men And A Tiger."

If you were ever a detective, I feel kinda sorry for your client(s). Because the evidence that you claim is absent in the case of TAS using AI is staring you right in the face.

I wanted to simply observe how people would react to any old blind item, completely speculative with absolutely NO evidence to support it. Not one shred. Merely ’speculation,’ which people then repeat as though it is "fact."

Below is some of the evidence that the people in the Reddit thread presented. In the aggregate, it’s pretty convincing. (A helluva lot more convincing than your "Trust me bro, I know these people and they’re ethical AF so they would never!") 

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>>A tell that really sticks out to me in Valin’s review is this line:

• Advanced SMPS delivering extreme current क्षमता

WTF is that? It looks like machine-generated text contamination; the English word “capacity” has been replaced by (yeah I looked it up!) the Hindi equivalent. Would a flesh-and-blood author make such a mistake? I can’t even imagine how. Could a chatbot? Yes, it’s a perfectly plausible glitch in generated text from an LLM that’s trained on hundreds of millions of pieces of text across many major languages.

And as I mentioned, ChatGPT uses that “It’s not X — it’s Y" all the freakin’ time. Never stops. Here it is in Valin’s review, repeatedly:

"Music wasn’t just detailed—it was complete."

“The 717 arrives—not as an iteration, but as a complete redesign.”

"It is not just an evolution—it is a redefinition of solid-state amplification."

Also consider that soulless marketing/PR language. (If Valin did write that shit, it’s still nothing to be proud of!)<<

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You were on Reddit carrying water for Valin and Harley and do that here on Audiogon as well...and it’s so transparent.

More from Redditors who have better-developed critical faculties than you do:

>>The simple fact that someone uses m-dashes is no strong indication of AI use. But if someone uses them repeatedly and in the exact way I outlined — that is, in the middle of ChatGPT’s infamous, tell-tale "It’s not X — it’s Y" constructions —then I would say I have some pretty solid evidence on my side.

And that’s just one of several serious indications that Valin copy-pasted AI-generated text to "write" that Soulution review. Why do you have nothing to say about the sudden appearance of a Hindi word in the middle of Valin’s bullet-pointed text? That’s a bizarre anomaly that no English-language writer or editor could introduce inadvertently, but it’s quite a plausible error for an LLM.

You also conveniently ignore the odd spray of bullet points in Valin’s piece (highly unusual at TAS), the ultra-short paragraphs that are organized and subheaded exactly as ChatGPT does, the soulless and meaningless PR verbiage that reads like bot lingo, and so on.<<

On Reddit, you wrote,

Harley would NEVER have allowed it. .... I KNOW the magazine far better than ANY of you.

It was then correctly pointed out to you that

>>That’s not the flex you think it is. You treat it as some kind of self-evident advantage that you know both of these men, but your close relationship with them probably explains your unwillingness to look at all the evidence that supports the likelihood that Jonathan Valin committed journalistic malpractice. Either Robert Harley decided to look the other way, or, best case scenario, he didn’t catch on — just like you didn’t.<<

I don’t even think that at your age (80, right?) you’ve ever worked with AI — not because you’re old, but because if you had, you’d easily recognize AI’s tell-tale patterns. The rest of us sure did!