If you want to experiment with reported news using untested tools that have known quality problems, do it in a strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted. Senior editor(s) need to be in the loop. Start with something easier, not controversial or high-profile articles.
One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
> One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
It sounds like you're implying that's what happened here, but I don't see any of that in the article. Was additional info shared elsewhere?
Edit: oh, I see links to the article author's social media saying this. Nevermind my question, and I agree.
Not sure how widespread an occurrence in the industry at large, but in two slowly dying publications I'm familiar with, the editors were the first to be let go.
Quality took a nosedive, which may or may not have quickened the death spiral.
All that to say, there may not even be senior editors around to put in the loop.
The good news is that there are 3 senior editors (though none tasked with AI specifically), the bad news is that one of them was the coauthor. Their staff page does list two copy editors (variously labeled "copy editor" and "copyeditor" which is unfortunate) but no one assigned to fact checking specifically.
Those are exactly the types of jobs that have been disappearing for years (not because of AI, but because of Internet). Same with editors. I regularly see embarrassing typos in major publications.
I can't help but think this is a reflection of the unwillingness of most people to actually pay for journalism online — and worse, the active and intentional effort to subvert copyright, making it more difficult for journlists to actually earn a living from their work.
People don't value journalism. They expect it to be free, generally. Therefore, companies like Ars are put into a position of expecting too much from their journalists.
HN is rife with people with this attitude -- frequently linking to "archive" sites for otherwise paywalled articles, complaining when companies try to build email lists, charge for their work, or have advertising on their sites. The underlying message, of course, is that journalism shouldn't be paid for.
Yes, Ars is at fault if they have a bad company culture. However, the broader culture is a real factor here as well.
I think this is entirely plausible lapse for someone with a bad fever, especially if they routinely work from home and are primarily communicating over text-based channels. Personally I'm much more inclined to blame the organization, as it sounds like they knowingly accepted work from someone who was potentially going to be in an altered mental state.
> strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted
I don't know journalism from the inside, though of course it's one of those professions that everyone things they understand and has an opinion about. Realistically, is it especially careful vetting to verify the quotes and check the factual statements? The quotes seem like especially obvious risks - no matter how sick, who would let an LLM write anything without verifying quotes?
That seems like not verifying currency figures in an estimate or quote, and especially in one written by an LLM - I just can't imagine it. I'd be better off estimating the figures myself or removing them.
Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.
I agree that the work culture promoting this is bad, but being sick is still simply not an excuse to fabricate quotes with AI. It's still just journalistic malfeasance, and if Ars actually cares about the quality of their journalism, he should be fired for it.
Have you met any professional journos? It's not exactly a laid back profession. I could easily imagine the people I know pushing through illness to get a story out.
That's a poor mea culpa. It begins with a preamble attempting to garner sympathy from the reader before it gets to the acknowledgement of the error, which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity.
> which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity
That’s not sleight-of-hand, I think we all immediately recognize it for what it is. Whether it is good form to lead with an excuse is a matter of opinion, but it’s not deceptive.
Okay. I've been harsh on Ars Technica in these comments, and I'm going to continue to hold an asterisk in my head whenever I see them cited as a source going forward. However, at least one thing in this apology does seem more reasonable than people have made it out to be: I think it's fine for reporters at an AI-skeptical outlet to play around with various AI tools in their work. Benj Edwards should have been way more cautious, but I think that people should be making periodic contact with the state of these tools (and their pitfalls!), especially if they're going to opine.[1]
We don't know yet how widespread these practices are at Ars Technica, or whether this is a one-off. But if it went down like he says it did here, then the coincidental nature of this mistake -- i.e., that it's an AI user error in reporting an AI novel behavior story at an AI-skeptical outlet -- merely makes it ironic, not more egregious than it already is.
[1] Edit: I read and agreed with ilamont's new comment elsewhere in this thread, right after posting this. It's a very reasonable caveat! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029193
I speculate that curious minds, with a forensic inclination and free time, will go back to previous articles and find out it happened before...When you see a cockroach...
It's not really important whether it's a one-off thing with this one guy, he's not relevant in the big picture. To the extent that he deindividualizes his labor he's just one more fungible operator of AI anyway.
People are making a bigger deal about it than this one article or site warrants because of ongoing discourse about whether LLM tech will regularly and inevitably lead to these mistakes. We're all starting to get sick of hearing about it, but this keeps happening.
Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.
I'm happy that they fixed it, checked for any similar errors, and promised that they would improve their processes to try to prevent it from happening again.
This is pretty much what I expect when an organization makes a mistake. Many organizations don't do as well.
the apology for the mistake is fine but it is expected journalistic practice to hand an article to a fact checker before it goes out who will quite literally make sure names, dates, quotes and so on are authentic.
I thought of Ars Technica as a pretty decent publication, now I am wondering if they actually check what they publish.
I mean, honestly, “it was a failure and we won’t do it again” is better than a lot of outlets would do; some have the magic robots wholesale make up articles for them.
> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.
For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.
But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:
> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.
> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”
> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”
> ...
> “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”
Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.
He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.
I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:
1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.
2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.
3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.
I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.
That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.
As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.
So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.
(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)
Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.
> Odd that there's no link to the retracted article.
Well, it's retracted. That means that it shouldn't exist any more, so while they could link to the archive, it defeats the point of retracting it if they do so, right?
What are they changing to prevent this from happening in the future? Why was the use of LLMs not disclosed in the original article? Do they host any other articles covertly generated by LLMs?
As far as I can tell, the pulled article had no obvious tells and was caught only because the quotes were entirely made up. Surely it's not the only one, though?
The _claim_ is that the article wasn’t AI generated, only the quote (the journalist rather unwisely trusted in the ability of an LLM to summarise things).
> That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy.
Ars were caught with their pants down. We have no reason to believe otherwise. It isn't possible to prove otherwise. We as readers are lucky ars quoted someone who disabled LLM access to their website, causing the hallucination and giving us a smoking gun.
People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions.
The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
> That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such.
Correct, I only mentioned the blame-free post-mortem thing to head off the usual excuses, as a shorthand for the general approach. It has merits in many/most circumstances.
> I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response,
Again, correct. It's only appropriate in cases of malice.
Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.
> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it
My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization.
(My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)
Blameless post-mortems work really well when you use them to fix process issues. In this case, you'd identify issues like "not all quotes are fact checked because our submissions to editorial staff don't require sources and the checklist doesn't require fact checks", "the journalist worked while sick because we were understaffed", "nothing should ever be copy-pasted from an LLM", etc.
Outsourcing your job as a journalist to a chatbot that you know for a fact falsifies quotes (and everything else it generates) is absolutely intentional.
I think that is the crucial question. Often we lump together malice with "reckless disregard". The intention to cause harm is very close to the intention to do something that you know or should know is likely to cause harm, and we often treat them the same because there is no real way to prove intent, so otherwise everyone could just say they "meant no harm" and just didn't realize how harmful their actions could be.
I think that a journalist using an AI tool to write an article treads perilously close to that kind of recklessness. It is like a carpenter building a staircase using some kind of weak glue.
Replace parent-poster's "malice" with "malfeasance", and it works well-enough.
I may not intend to burn someone's house down by doing horribly reckless things with fireworks... but after it happens, surely I would still bear both some fault and some responsibility.
"Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
I'll admit that at least looks consistent with extreme carelessness rather than lying. I don't find it terribly convincing, though. I find it a suspiciously long chain of excuses perfectly calibrated to excuse the events. The description gets vague right at the critical point where AI output gets laundered into journalistic output, and the part about the tool being strictly to gather "verbatim source material" sounds like the narrow end of a wedge of excuses for something that actually doesn't do that. But I don't have the background to tell with confidence whether he's lying. If it turns out he's not, well, I'd feel a little bad, but I still wouldn't respect him.
I certainly stand by my broader claim that lying is fireable.
At this point anyone reporting on tech should know the problems with AI. As such even if AI is used for research and articles are written on that output by human there is still absolute unquestionable expectation to do the standard manual verification of facts. Not doing it is pure malice.
I don’t see how you could know that without more information. Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes. It might just be careless.
Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.
we're really at the point where people are just writing off a journalist passing off their job to a chatgpt prompt as though that's a normal and defensible thing to be doing
> Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.
Both from the Mastodon post of the journalist (which admits to casual use of more than one LLM), and from a cursory review of this author's past articles, I'm willing to bet that this rule wasn't followed more than once.
Remember the old days when journalists would be excommunicated for plagarism and/or making things up? Some of those folks must be like "I was just too early..."
Ars is owned by Conde Nast, which had to let go of its HQ in 2024. I suspect they don't have a plan to replace a journalist like Benj if they axe him. And it's not like readers are going to hold them accountable.
The clear difference between this and Stephen Glass-style confabulation is intent. There's no indication Edwards knowingly, deliberately invented quotes. It was a clumsy mistake.
When an article is retracted it's standard to at least mention the title and what specific information was incorrect so that anyone who may have read, cited or linked it is informed what information was inaccurate. That's actually the point of a retraction and without it this non-standard retraction has no utility except being a fig leaf for Ars to prevent external reporting becoming a bigger story.
In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje.... Now that I know which article, I know it's one I read. I remember the basic facts of what was reported but I don't recall the specifics of any quotes. Usually quotes in a news article support or contextualize the related facts being reported. This non-standard retraction leaves me uncertain if all the facts reported were accurate.
It's also common to provide at least a brief description of how the error happened and the steps the publication will take to prevent future occurrences.. I assume any info on how it happened is missing because none of it looks good for Ars but why no details on policy changes?
Edit to add more info: I hadn't yet read the now-retracted original article on achive.org. Now that I have I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article". Scott, the person originally misquoted, also suspects something stranger is going on.
> "This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed."https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
My theory is a bit different than Scott's: Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publishers using LLMs to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.
In the case of hallucinated quotes, I think the more important aspect is to describe how this happened, whether the author is a regular contributor, how the editors missed it, and what steps are being taken to prevent it from happening in the future.
It's good to issue a correction, and in this case to retract the article. But it doesn't really give me confidence going forward, especially where this was flagged because the misquoted person raised the issue. It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error.
It makes me think I should get in the habit of reading week-old Ars articles, whose errors would likely have been caught by early readers.
> It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error.
It might be even worse (and more interesting) than that. I just posted a sister response outlining why I now suspect the fabrication may have actually been caused by Ars' own process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027370. Hence, the odd non-standard retraction.
I was wondering the same thing. After I posted above, I followed the archive.org link to the original article and did a quick search on the last four quotes, which the article claims are from Scott's blog. None appear on the linked blog page. The first quote the article claims is from Scott does appear on the linked Github comments page.
When I wrote my post above, I hadn't yet read the original article on achive.org. Now that I know the article actually links to the claimed original sources on Scott's blog and Github for all the fabricated quotes, how this could have happened is even more puzzling. Now I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article".
Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publisher's using LLM's to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.
Fabricated quotes has been a huge problem outside the new AI issues for years(decades?). The vast majority of print "news" people consume is cynically designed "outrage porn" targeted towards different segment's political proclivities; aka "opinion" and "analysis" pieces. Both sides for maximum clicks!
They put quote-looking not-quotes in the headlines and articles routinely that essentially amount to "putting words in someone's mouth". A very large portion of the population seems to take this at face value as direct quotes, or accurate paraphrasing, when they absolutely are not.
Imagine a future news environment where oodles of different models are applied to fact check most stories from most major sources. The markup from each one is aggregated and viewable.
A lot of the results would be predictable partisan takes and add no value. But in a case like this where the whole conversation is public, the inclusion of fabricated quotes would become evident. Certain classes of errors would become lucid.
Ars Technica blames an over reliance on AI tools and that is obviously true. But there is a potential for this epistemic regression to be an early stage of spiral development, before we learn to leverage AI tools routinely to inspect every published assertion. And then use those results to surface false and controversial ones for human attention.
The author of the blog post hypothesised that the fabrication happened as a result of measures blocking LLMs from scraping their blog. If that is the case, adding more LLMs would not in fact accomplish anything at all.
Kinda disappointing that the post that first reported the Ars Technica article and retraction got ~50% more comments than this one at about the same age. Seems people just love to outrage and complain than wait for the promised post-mortem, which if anything, came early.
Elsewhere I've seen a post from the author talking about how his old articles hit so many of Wikipedia's identified signs of AI-generated text. As somebody who's own style hits many of those same stylistic/rhetorical techniques, I definitely sympathize.
This is something you don’t see a lot in journalism nowadays. Multiple publications have been caught in multiple provable lies or inaccuracies over the last few years, and this is the first official retraction I’ve seen. I tip my hat to the ars team.
There are official retractions in reputable publications almost every day. Lots of major publications have an entire section of their website devoted to it:
> We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years
If the coverage of those risks brought us here, of what use was the coverage?
Another day, another instance of this. Everyone who warned that AI would be used lazily without the necessary fact-checking of the output is being proven right.
Sadly, five years from now this may not even result in an apology. People might roll their eyes at you for correcting a hallucination they way they do today if you point out a typo.
> Sadly, five years from now this may not even result in an apology. People might roll their eyes at you for correcting a hallucination they way they do today if you point out a typo.
I see a lot of negative comments on this retraction about how they could have done it better. Things can always be done better but I think the important thing is that they did it at all. Too many 'news' outlets today just ignore their egregious errors, misrepresentations and outright lies and get away with it. I find it refreshing to see not just a correction, but a full retraction of this article. We need to encourage actual journalistic integrity when we see it, even if it is imperfect. This retraction gives me more faith in future articles from them since I know there is at least some editorial review, even if it isn't perfect.
Respectfully, I find this to be an unwarranted positive reaction to have toward this situation. What other action could Ars possibly take as a journalistic business? The quotes are indisputably false. This is hardly a praise-worthy action to take. It's the expected and required action.
With regard to editorial review, an editor didn't catch the error. The target of the false quotes had to register on Ars and post a comment about it. To top it off, more than one Ars commenter was openly suspicious that he was a fake account. Only when some of the readers checked for themselves to see that the quotes were indeed falsified did it gain attention from Ars staff.
This was literally the best possible case for catching it - “quoted” person complaining, clearly visible page doesn’t have the quotes, and it still was a fight.
Most people would have had no hope and nobody would ever know.
We have a problem right now there is a lot of a bad 'news' sites and the few that do any good get slammed because they listen. Go ahead, slam Fox news and see how far that goes. I think this creates a very negative incentive to be responsible in journalism. If you try a little you will be hammered but if you don't try at all you get the pass. My point was, and still is, that we need to encourage the positive when we see it in hopes that it creates more positive in the future. It is just like raising a child. If you jump on them because they only did part of the right answer then next time they will do none of the right answer. The big point here is we need to be asking ourselves: What is the goal of the criticism? Are we achieving it? Is there a better way?
Zero repercussions for the senior editor involved in fabricating quotations (they neglect to even name the culprit), so this is essentially an open confession that Ars has zero (really, negative) journalistic integrity and will continue to blatantly fabricate articles rather than even pretending to do journalism, so long as they don't get caught. To get to the stage where an editor who has been at the company for 14 years is allowed to publish fraudulent LLM output, which is both plagiarism (claiming the output as his own), and engaging in the spread of disinformation by fabricating stories wholesale, indicates a deep cultural rot within the organisation that should warrant a response deeper than "oopsie". The publication of that article was not an accident.
What is the evidence that lead you to believe there have been no repercussions? In what world do they retract the article without at a minimum giving a stern warning to the people involved?
If they had named the people involved, the criticism would be, "they aren't taking responsibility, they're passing the buck to these employees."
tl;dr: We apologize for getting caught. Ars Subscriptors in the comments thank Ars for their diligence in handling an editorial fuckup that wasn't identified by Ars.
I don't know how you could possibly have that take away from reading this. They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident and reaffirmed that it did not follow the journalistic standards they have set for themselves.
They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.
It's embarrassing for them to put out such a boilerplate "apology" but even more embarrassing to take it at its word.
It's such a cliche that they should have apologized in a human enough way that it didn't sound like the apology was AI generated as well. It's one way they could have earned back a small bit of credibility.
The comments are trending towards being more critical as of my posting. A lot more asking what they're going to do about the authors, and what the hell happened.
> Greatly appreciate this direct statement clarifying your standards, and yet another reason that I hope Ars can remain a strong example of quality journalism in a world where that is becoming hard to find
> Kudos to ARS for catching this and very publicly stating it.
> Thank you for upholding your journalistic standards. And a note to our current administration in DC - this is what transparency looks like.
> Thank you for upholding the standards of journalism we appreciate at ars!
> Thank you for your clarity and integrity on your correction. I am a long time reader and ardent supporter of Ars for exactly these reasons. Trust is so rare but also the bedrock of civilization. Thank you for taking it seriously in the age of mass produced lies.
> I like the decisive editorial action. No BS, just high human standards of integrity. That's another reason to stick with ARS over news feeds.
There is some criticism, but there is also quite a lot of incredible glazing.
Former technology journalist here.
If you want to experiment with reported news using untested tools that have known quality problems, do it in a strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted. Senior editor(s) need to be in the loop. Start with something easier, not controversial or high-profile articles.
One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
> One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
It sounds like you're implying that's what happened here, but I don't see any of that in the article. Was additional info shared elsewhere?
Edit: oh, I see links to the article author's social media saying this. Nevermind my question, and I agree.
Took me a while to find, here's one of the authors Benj Edwards with a statement on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
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Not sure how widespread an occurrence in the industry at large, but in two slowly dying publications I'm familiar with, the editors were the first to be let go.
Quality took a nosedive, which may or may not have quickened the death spiral.
All that to say, there may not even be senior editors around to put in the loop.
The good news is that there are 3 senior editors (though none tasked with AI specifically), the bad news is that one of them was the coauthor. Their staff page does list two copy editors (variously labeled "copy editor" and "copyeditor" which is unfortunate) but no one assigned to fact checking specifically.
In mainstream journalism wasn't the practice to have a junior position research and confirm quotes, dates, proper names, etc?
Those are exactly the types of jobs that have been disappearing for years (not because of AI, but because of Internet). Same with editors. I regularly see embarrassing typos in major publications.
I can't help but think this is a reflection of the unwillingness of most people to actually pay for journalism online — and worse, the active and intentional effort to subvert copyright, making it more difficult for journlists to actually earn a living from their work.
People don't value journalism. They expect it to be free, generally. Therefore, companies like Ars are put into a position of expecting too much from their journalists.
HN is rife with people with this attitude -- frequently linking to "archive" sites for otherwise paywalled articles, complaining when companies try to build email lists, charge for their work, or have advertising on their sites. The underlying message, of course, is that journalism shouldn't be paid for.
Yes, Ars is at fault if they have a bad company culture. However, the broader culture is a real factor here as well.
I think this is entirely plausible lapse for someone with a bad fever, especially if they routinely work from home and are primarily communicating over text-based channels. Personally I'm much more inclined to blame the organization, as it sounds like they knowingly accepted work from someone who was potentially going to be in an altered mental state.
> strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted
I don't know journalism from the inside, though of course it's one of those professions that everyone things they understand and has an opinion about. Realistically, is it especially careful vetting to verify the quotes and check the factual statements? The quotes seem like especially obvious risks - no matter how sick, who would let an LLM write anything without verifying quotes?
That seems like not verifying currency figures in an estimate or quote, and especially in one written by an LLM - I just can't imagine it. I'd be better off estimating the figures myself or removing them.
Possibly the author doesn't understand LLMs well.
Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
[1] your mileage may vary on how much you believe it and how much slack you want to cut him if you do
The bigger problem is that he felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever.
Makes me wonder about Ars Technica's company culture.
I agree that the work culture promoting this is bad, but being sick is still simply not an excuse to fabricate quotes with AI. It's still just journalistic malfeasance, and if Ars actually cares about the quality of their journalism, he should be fired for it.
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Have you met any professional journos? It's not exactly a laid back profession. I could easily imagine the people I know pushing through illness to get a story out.
> felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever
You are assuming that...
He says he currently has a fever.
But was he sick when he wrote the article? That is not so clear.
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tbh that's the least surprising aspect of this. Most journalists do not have work-life balance.
That's a poor mea culpa. It begins with a preamble attempting to garner sympathy from the reader before it gets to the acknowledgement of the error, which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity.
> which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity
That’s not sleight-of-hand, I think we all immediately recognize it for what it is. Whether it is good form to lead with an excuse is a matter of opinion, but it’s not deceptive.
Okay. I've been harsh on Ars Technica in these comments, and I'm going to continue to hold an asterisk in my head whenever I see them cited as a source going forward. However, at least one thing in this apology does seem more reasonable than people have made it out to be: I think it's fine for reporters at an AI-skeptical outlet to play around with various AI tools in their work. Benj Edwards should have been way more cautious, but I think that people should be making periodic contact with the state of these tools (and their pitfalls!), especially if they're going to opine.[1]
We don't know yet how widespread these practices are at Ars Technica, or whether this is a one-off. But if it went down like he says it did here, then the coincidental nature of this mistake -- i.e., that it's an AI user error in reporting an AI novel behavior story at an AI-skeptical outlet -- merely makes it ironic, not more egregious than it already is.
[1] Edit: I read and agreed with ilamont's new comment elsewhere in this thread, right after posting this. It's a very reasonable caveat! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029193
I speculate that curious minds, with a forensic inclination and free time, will go back to previous articles and find out it happened before...When you see a cockroach...
It's not really important whether it's a one-off thing with this one guy, he's not relevant in the big picture. To the extent that he deindividualizes his labor he's just one more fungible operator of AI anyway.
People are making a bigger deal about it than this one article or site warrants because of ongoing discourse about whether LLM tech will regularly and inevitably lead to these mistakes. We're all starting to get sick of hearing about it, but this keeps happening.
Recent and related (in reverse order):
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (746 comments)
Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.
I'm happy that they fixed it, checked for any similar errors, and promised that they would improve their processes to try to prevent it from happening again.
This is pretty much what I expect when an organization makes a mistake. Many organizations don't do as well.
Standard practice at most organisations these days is to apologize then keep doing it, it seems
the apology for the mistake is fine but it is expected journalistic practice to hand an article to a fact checker before it goes out who will quite literally make sure names, dates, quotes and so on are authentic.
I thought of Ars Technica as a pretty decent publication, now I am wondering if they actually check what they publish.
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I mean, honestly, “it was a failure and we won’t do it again” is better than a lot of outlets would do; some have the magic robots wholesale make up articles for them.
While I commend Ars and the author for taking responsibility, I am a bit off put by the wording used for the retraction on the original article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...
> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.
For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.
But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
and all the quotes are fake. The section:
> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.
> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”
> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”
> ...
> “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”
Source: the original Ars Technica article:
https://archive.md/8VPMw
Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).
Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.
He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.
Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
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I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:
1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.
2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.
3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.
I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.
That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.
As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
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He did not even mentioned the Dow...
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Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?
There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.
So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.
(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)
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Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.
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Odd that there's no link to the retracted article.
Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-...
The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
> Odd that there's no link to the retracted article.
Well, it's retracted. That means that it shouldn't exist any more, so while they could link to the archive, it defeats the point of retracting it if they do so, right?
> Odd that there's no link to the retracted article.
Not at all. Whitewash.
The articles authors are listed on that page as: Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland.
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What are they changing to prevent this from happening in the future? Why was the use of LLMs not disclosed in the original article? Do they host any other articles covertly generated by LLMs?
As far as I can tell, the pulled article had no obvious tells and was caught only because the quotes were entirely made up. Surely it's not the only one, though?
My read is, "Oops someone made a mistake and got caught. That shouldn't have happened. Let's do better in the future." and that's about it.
The _claim_ is that the article wasn’t AI generated, only the quote (the journalist rather unwisely trusted in the ability of an LLM to summarise things).
> That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy.
Ars were caught with their pants down. We have no reason to believe otherwise. It isn't possible to prove otherwise. We as readers are lucky ars quoted someone who disabled LLM access to their website, causing the hallucination and giving us a smoking gun.
Clawing back credibility will be hard
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People put a lot of weight on blame-free post-mortems and not punishing people who make "mistakes", but I believe that has to stop at the level of malice. Falsifying quotes is malice. Fire the malicious party or everything else you say is worthless.
That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions.
The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
Most of the time a firing is not a reasonable or helpful response to a mistake.
This was not a mistake.
> That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such.
Correct, I only mentioned the blame-free post-mortem thing to head off the usual excuses, as a shorthand for the general approach. It has merits in many/most circumstances.
> I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response,
Again, correct. It's only appropriate in cases of malice.
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Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.
> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it
My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization.
(My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)
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Blameless post-mortems work really well when you use them to fix process issues. In this case, you'd identify issues like "not all quotes are fact checked because our submissions to editorial staff don't require sources and the checklist doesn't require fact checks", "the journalist worked while sick because we were understaffed", "nothing should ever be copy-pasted from an LLM", etc.
There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
Outsourcing your job as a journalist to a chatbot that you know for a fact falsifies quotes (and everything else it generates) is absolutely intentional.
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I think that is the crucial question. Often we lump together malice with "reckless disregard". The intention to cause harm is very close to the intention to do something that you know or should know is likely to cause harm, and we often treat them the same because there is no real way to prove intent, so otherwise everyone could just say they "meant no harm" and just didn't realize how harmful their actions could be.
I think that a journalist using an AI tool to write an article treads perilously close to that kind of recklessness. It is like a carpenter building a staircase using some kind of weak glue.
Replace parent-poster's "malice" with "malfeasance", and it works well-enough.
I may not intend to burn someone's house down by doing horribly reckless things with fireworks... but after it happens, surely I would still bear both some fault and some responsibility.
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The malice is passing off someone else's writing as your own.
Outsourcing writing to a bot without attribution may not be malicious, but it does strain integrity.
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> Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
"Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
The issues with such tools are highly documented though. If you’re going to use a tool with known issues you’d better do your best to cover for them.
The tool when working as intended makes up quotes. Passing that off as journalism is either malicious or unacceptably incompetent.
They're expected by policy to not use AI. Lying about using AI is also malice.
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I'm curious if you've read the author's Bluesky statement (which wasn't available when you made your comment) and what you think of it?
I'll admit that at least looks consistent with extreme carelessness rather than lying. I don't find it terribly convincing, though. I find it a suspiciously long chain of excuses perfectly calibrated to excuse the events. The description gets vague right at the critical point where AI output gets laundered into journalistic output, and the part about the tool being strictly to gather "verbatim source material" sounds like the narrow end of a wedge of excuses for something that actually doesn't do that. But I don't have the background to tell with confidence whether he's lying. If it turns out he's not, well, I'd feel a little bad, but I still wouldn't respect him.
I certainly stand by my broader claim that lying is fireable.
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At this point anyone reporting on tech should know the problems with AI. As such even if AI is used for research and articles are written on that output by human there is still absolute unquestionable expectation to do the standard manual verification of facts. Not doing it is pure malice.
I don’t see how you could know that without more information. Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes. It might just be careless.
Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.
> Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes
He covers AI for Ars Technica. Like, if he doesn't know that chatbots make shit up...
FWIW I suspect that a lot of the problem here was that he was _working while he had a high fever_. This is a really bad idea.
we are fucking doomed holy shit
we're really at the point where people are just writing off a journalist passing off their job to a chatgpt prompt as though that's a normal and defensible thing to be doing
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> Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.
Both from the Mastodon post of the journalist (which admits to casual use of more than one LLM), and from a cursory review of this author's past articles, I'm willing to bet that this rule wasn't followed more than once.
Feels like nail in the coffin, Ars has already been going downhill for half a decade or more.
I unsubscribed (just the free rss) regardless of their retraction.
Unsubscribing from the free RSS feed. If you weren't paying or consuming ads, I'm not sure how much your vote should count.
This sort of publication lives or dies on mindshare.
So I can only share my opinion about Ars if I’m a paying subscriber? XD
Remember the old days when journalists would be excommunicated for plagarism and/or making things up? Some of those folks must be like "I was just too early..."
Remember the old days when people paid for news?
Ars is owned by Conde Nast, which had to let go of its HQ in 2024. I suspect they don't have a plan to replace a journalist like Benj if they axe him. And it's not like readers are going to hold them accountable.
The clear difference between this and Stephen Glass-style confabulation is intent. There's no indication Edwards knowingly, deliberately invented quotes. It was a clumsy mistake.
When an article is retracted it's standard to at least mention the title and what specific information was incorrect so that anyone who may have read, cited or linked it is informed what information was inaccurate. That's actually the point of a retraction and without it this non-standard retraction has no utility except being a fig leaf for Ars to prevent external reporting becoming a bigger story.
In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje.... Now that I know which article, I know it's one I read. I remember the basic facts of what was reported but I don't recall the specifics of any quotes. Usually quotes in a news article support or contextualize the related facts being reported. This non-standard retraction leaves me uncertain if all the facts reported were accurate.
It's also common to provide at least a brief description of how the error happened and the steps the publication will take to prevent future occurrences.. I assume any info on how it happened is missing because none of it looks good for Ars but why no details on policy changes?
Edit to add more info: I hadn't yet read the now-retracted original article on achive.org. Now that I have I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article". Scott, the person originally misquoted, also suspects something stranger is going on.
> "This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed." https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
My theory is a bit different than Scott's: Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publishers using LLMs to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.
In the case of hallucinated quotes, I think the more important aspect is to describe how this happened, whether the author is a regular contributor, how the editors missed it, and what steps are being taken to prevent it from happening in the future.
It's good to issue a correction, and in this case to retract the article. But it doesn't really give me confidence going forward, especially where this was flagged because the misquoted person raised the issue. It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error.
It makes me think I should get in the habit of reading week-old Ars articles, whose errors would likely have been caught by early readers.
> It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error.
It might be even worse (and more interesting) than that. I just posted a sister response outlining why I now suspect the fabrication may have actually been caused by Ars' own process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47027370. Hence, the odd non-standard retraction.
Yes I just read the retracted article and I can't find anything that I knew was false. What were the fabricated quotes?
This blog post from the person who was falsely quoted has screenshots and an archive link: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
I was wondering the same thing. After I posted above, I followed the archive.org link to the original article and did a quick search on the last four quotes, which the article claims are from Scott's blog. None appear on the linked blog page. The first quote the article claims is from Scott does appear on the linked Github comments page.
When I wrote my post above, I hadn't yet read the original article on achive.org. Now that I know the article actually links to the claimed original sources on Scott's blog and Github for all the fabricated quotes, how this could have happened is even more puzzling. Now I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article".
Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publisher's using LLM's to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.
This is not a retraction. It is just CYA - Cover your Arse Technica.
They need to enumerate the specific details they fudged.
They need to correct any inaccuracies.
Otherwise, there is little reason to trust Arse Technica in the future.
Fabricated quotes has been a huge problem outside the new AI issues for years(decades?). The vast majority of print "news" people consume is cynically designed "outrage porn" targeted towards different segment's political proclivities; aka "opinion" and "analysis" pieces. Both sides for maximum clicks!
They put quote-looking not-quotes in the headlines and articles routinely that essentially amount to "putting words in someone's mouth". A very large portion of the population seems to take this at face value as direct quotes, or accurate paraphrasing, when they absolutely are not.
Imagine a future news environment where oodles of different models are applied to fact check most stories from most major sources. The markup from each one is aggregated and viewable.
A lot of the results would be predictable partisan takes and add no value. But in a case like this where the whole conversation is public, the inclusion of fabricated quotes would become evident. Certain classes of errors would become lucid.
Ars Technica blames an over reliance on AI tools and that is obviously true. But there is a potential for this epistemic regression to be an early stage of spiral development, before we learn to leverage AI tools routinely to inspect every published assertion. And then use those results to surface false and controversial ones for human attention.
So, the solution to too much AI is... Even more AI! You sound like you would fit just right at a LLM-shop marketing department.
The author of the blog post hypothesised that the fabrication happened as a result of measures blocking LLMs from scraping their blog. If that is the case, adding more LLMs would not in fact accomplish anything at all.
Kinda disappointing that the post that first reported the Ars Technica article and retraction got ~50% more comments than this one at about the same age. Seems people just love to outrage and complain than wait for the promised post-mortem, which if anything, came early.
Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20260214134656/https://news.ycom...
Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.
Elsewhere I've seen a post from the author talking about how his old articles hit so many of Wikipedia's identified signs of AI-generated text. As somebody who's own style hits many of those same stylistic/rhetorical techniques, I definitely sympathize.
Did you fire the writer? No? Then what.
This is something you don’t see a lot in journalism nowadays. Multiple publications have been caught in multiple provable lies or inaccuracies over the last few years, and this is the first official retraction I’ve seen. I tip my hat to the ars team.
There are official retractions in reputable publications almost every day. Lots of major publications have an entire section of their website devoted to it:
https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections
https://www.wsj.com/news/types/corrections
etc etc. Many of them include the retraction or correction in the following print edition, if they have one, as well.
Exactly. And they don’t just rip down the old article but annotate it with a disclaimer that an earlier version said XXX
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... This is the first official retraction you've seen? Eh? All proper newspapers do them fairly regularly.
Previously:
Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer; pulls story
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059
> We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years
If the coverage of those risks brought us here, of what use was the coverage?
Another day, another instance of this. Everyone who warned that AI would be used lazily without the necessary fact-checking of the output is being proven right.
Sadly, five years from now this may not even result in an apology. People might roll their eyes at you for correcting a hallucination they way they do today if you point out a typo.
> Sadly, five years from now this may not even result in an apology. People might roll their eyes at you for correcting a hallucination they way they do today if you point out a typo.
I think this track is unavoidable. I hate it.
I see a lot of negative comments on this retraction about how they could have done it better. Things can always be done better but I think the important thing is that they did it at all. Too many 'news' outlets today just ignore their egregious errors, misrepresentations and outright lies and get away with it. I find it refreshing to see not just a correction, but a full retraction of this article. We need to encourage actual journalistic integrity when we see it, even if it is imperfect. This retraction gives me more faith in future articles from them since I know there is at least some editorial review, even if it isn't perfect.
Respectfully, I find this to be an unwarranted positive reaction to have toward this situation. What other action could Ars possibly take as a journalistic business? The quotes are indisputably false. This is hardly a praise-worthy action to take. It's the expected and required action.
With regard to editorial review, an editor didn't catch the error. The target of the false quotes had to register on Ars and post a comment about it. To top it off, more than one Ars commenter was openly suspicious that he was a fake account. Only when some of the readers checked for themselves to see that the quotes were indeed falsified did it gain attention from Ars staff.
This was literally the best possible case for catching it - “quoted” person complaining, clearly visible page doesn’t have the quotes, and it still was a fight.
Most people would have had no hope and nobody would ever know.
We have a problem right now there is a lot of a bad 'news' sites and the few that do any good get slammed because they listen. Go ahead, slam Fox news and see how far that goes. I think this creates a very negative incentive to be responsible in journalism. If you try a little you will be hammered but if you don't try at all you get the pass. My point was, and still is, that we need to encourage the positive when we see it in hopes that it creates more positive in the future. It is just like raising a child. If you jump on them because they only did part of the right answer then next time they will do none of the right answer. The big point here is we need to be asking ourselves: What is the goal of the criticism? Are we achieving it? Is there a better way?
Talk about tornado chasing the moving Overton Window. Too many 'news' outlets are bad so it's ok for all news outlets to be bad now.
Zero repercussions for the senior editor involved in fabricating quotations (they neglect to even name the culprit), so this is essentially an open confession that Ars has zero (really, negative) journalistic integrity and will continue to blatantly fabricate articles rather than even pretending to do journalism, so long as they don't get caught. To get to the stage where an editor who has been at the company for 14 years is allowed to publish fraudulent LLM output, which is both plagiarism (claiming the output as his own), and engaging in the spread of disinformation by fabricating stories wholesale, indicates a deep cultural rot within the organisation that should warrant a response deeper than "oopsie". The publication of that article was not an accident.
What is the evidence that lead you to believe there have been no repercussions? In what world do they retract the article without at a minimum giving a stern warning to the people involved?
If they had named the people involved, the criticism would be, "they aren't taking responsibility, they're passing the buck to these employees."
Who got fired?
The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not..
They're both still on the staff page presently. https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/
It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
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The lack of specificity to me suggests that someone probably is getting fired. It is written as if legal vetted every word.
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tl;dr: We apologize for getting caught. Ars Subscriptors in the comments thank Ars for their diligence in handling an editorial fuckup that wasn't identified by Ars.
I don't know how you could possibly have that take away from reading this. They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident and reaffirmed that it did not follow the journalistic standards they have set for themselves.
They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.
> That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.
It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions.
Sounds optional.
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> They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident
The only incident we know was isolated was getting caught.
It's embarrassing for them to put out such a boilerplate "apology" but even more embarrassing to take it at its word.
It's such a cliche that they should have apologized in a human enough way that it didn't sound like the apology was AI generated as well. It's one way they could have earned back a small bit of credibility.
The comments are trending towards being more critical as of my posting. A lot more asking what they're going to do about the authors, and what the hell happened.
> Greatly appreciate this direct statement clarifying your standards, and yet another reason that I hope Ars can remain a strong example of quality journalism in a world where that is becoming hard to find
> Kudos to ARS for catching this and very publicly stating it.
> Thank you for upholding your journalistic standards. And a note to our current administration in DC - this is what transparency looks like.
> Thank you for upholding the standards of journalism we appreciate at ars!
> Thank you for your clarity and integrity on your correction. I am a long time reader and ardent supporter of Ars for exactly these reasons. Trust is so rare but also the bedrock of civilization. Thank you for taking it seriously in the age of mass produced lies.
> I like the decisive editorial action. No BS, just high human standards of integrity. That's another reason to stick with ARS over news feeds.
There is some criticism, but there is also quite a lot of incredible glazing.
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