I can’t see the WSJ article. None of the mainstream articles I could find discuss Unimatic in any detail, including the Reuters and NYT articles.

I figure that there has to be a forum out there where the nature of the software glitch is the focus, but I couldn’t find anything. If this story is AI generated, then I would very much like to read the sources it’s lifted from.

I did find a 2007 article discussing another Unimatic glitch that caused a stoppage which mentioned that the software dates from 1988:

https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10387920/computer-fai...

> The computer system, known as Unimatic, is essential to the airline's operation, providing flight plans for pilots, updates on maintenance information and crew schedules, among other flight information. United jets worldwide cannot take off unless it is operating. The original Unimatic system dates back to at least 1988, but it is updated "all the time," United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said.

Probably HN needs an automated verification for quality/legitimacy before accepting a submission.

I’m ticked off that I got duped and would have welcomed a rejection. It sucks that lots of great HN comments got tied to an AI slop article.

Wow. I couldn’t tell. How did you find out that it may be AI generated.

1. Poor writing quality

2. Didn't exist before 2023 (https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/allchronology.co...)

3. Faces on https://allchronology.com/about/ look like they were taken from https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Not only the faces look like AI, their URLs look the part: https://i0.wp.com/allchronology.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

100k-ai-faces-3-1.jpg :)

Nice catch!!

The bios does not name the other "renowned" maganizes either they supposedly worked at.

Fo me, a few additional things:

Lots of boilerplate platitudes, especially towards the end of the story.

Some of the quotes appear to be fabricated. I can't find the "aviation analyst" tweet, and I'm pretty sure Maria Cantwell hasn't commented (unless it was video/audio only, and this is the only outlet that printed it). She's also no longer committee chair, being a member of the minority party in the Senate.

It very closely follows the AP article on this - like they copied their homework but changed some words - https://apnews.com/article/united-airlines-flights-grounded-...

I only skimmed the article and didn't catch it at first, but a deeper read shows overuse of "rule of 3" which to be fair is also something that hacks do.

But also factual errors, such as quoting the supposedly Democrat chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

It seemed unlikely that a Democrat was left in that post, and I googled it, and indeed they weren't.

But if the training data cut off before January 2025...

It didn't have a date or range of dates for the occurrence, which is weird.

The footer is literally just "wordpress.com".

A frustrating thing about paywalls on news sites is that they discourage linking to, because what's the point of linking to something if you don't know if the people you share the link with will be able to read it?

Which sadly leaves a gap in the market for AI slop. A few times recently I've tried to find a good news article to link to and had to chose between paywall sites, obvious AI slop or second-tier publications plastered with ads. I usually pick the third category.