Comment by AnonC
10 hours ago
Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies.
In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.
There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
I cannot disagree with you more strongly.
Ars did own up to its mistake both in writing and in firing the author. The author himself fell on his sword in detail on Bluesky.
Your only real complaint is that their published explanation wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that means it's sad to see them at this level?
> The author himself fell on his sword in detail on Bluesky.
Not exactly. He wrote a long excuse blaming being sick, sidestepping the issue that he was using AI tools to write for him and not making an effort to fact check.
Also Bluesky is not Ars Technica. It doesn’t matter what he posts on his own obscure social media page. We’re talking about the journalistic platform where he was given a wide audience.
> Your only real complaint is that their published explanation wasn't subjectively good enough for you and that means it's sad to see them at this level?
Why do you not think that’s a valid complaint? It appears they eventually did part ways, but Ars Technica has also been trying to lay as low as possible and avoid the topic in hopes that it will blow over.
Maybe I don't understand journalism but this guy being a reporter, shouldn't he have had an editor reviewing his work before they hit publish? I understand trusting a senior reporter but I would think due to libel concerns, they would check people's quotes ESPECIALLY if the reporter was sick.
Honestly it seems like journalism has been in their 'vibe code' era for a decade where they just publish whatever typos and all.
This was an institutional error, not an individual reporter's fault. We should also be asking why he was still contributing when he had a high fever. Why did his editors push him to publish his work? I will certainly write code and answer questions when I am sick when I am up to it but I would never push to main while sick.
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"I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words,” Edwards continued. He emphasized that the “text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars‘ editorial standards."
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A reporter whose bailiwick is AI should have known that he needed to check any quotes an LLM spat out. The editorial staff should have been checking too, and this absolutely is representative of their standards if they weren't.
It would probably be worth checking to see if any other articles or employees have similarly disappeared.
Editorial staff?
There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000. Then, as profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely disappeared.
Purely online entities have no way to pay for real editorial staff.
News has no money, compared to news of old. It's part of the reason 99% of modern news is just reporting other people's tweets or whatever.
I can't imagine many news companies having much money for court battles (to force disclosure of documents, or force declassification, or fighting to protect sources). Or spending months or years investigating a story.
Our news sources are poor, weak now.
> Editorial staff?
> There was such a thing, in newspapers up until 2000. Then, as profits nosedived, these sorts of things largely disappeared.
In a lot of ways you're right, but our public radio station (cpr.org) has the largest newsroom in the state, and that newsroom makes up over a third of our staff. So yeah "news companies" don't have news rooms but that's because their business isn't news. It's funneling user data to their parent companies and getting people to click ads.
However, thanks to "listeners [and viewers, and surfers] like you" public media is still working its ass off to make a difference despite being cut lose from the government. It won't work unless you switch your perspective to local news (where most of the real information is anyway) and unless you donate.
Apologies for turning a comment into a mini fund-drive :)
Agreed. Modern news is beyond lazy, and is not journalism by any means. Too many talking heads do nothing but sit behind a screen watching others for what to say next.
Granted, a few of the remaining newspapers I'm aware of run business awards (Best restaurant, etc), and the way to win is via wining and dining them, even though the paper claims it's based on people's votes.
That style of thinking - of entitlement - probably brought the lack of interest in both cable news and traditional web/paper outlets - as the younger generations started to see through it more.
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Yes: in newsrooms, this is the editor's responsibility. I note the editor wasn't fired.
It's the editor's responsibility to set processes and standards to try to make sure this doesn't happen. If the rules exist but the reporter breaks them, then it's the reporter's fault and they get fired. As happened -- that's part of the process of maintaining standards. It's not the editor's fault. What exactly do you expect them to do? They can't fact-check and verify every single fact and quote in every article. They're not superhuman.
Isn't that the factchecker's job?
When more and more typos started to creep into news articles of our state-owned, national news feed and people started to notice, the explanation we got was basically that the frequency of news articles is so supposedly so high that it is supposedly impossible to catch them. If news orgs can't even do as much proof reading that they catch typos and grammatical errors, I highly doubt anyone is still doing editorial checking...
It's the editors responsibility to make sure fabricated quotes don't get published, but it's also the journalist's responsibility to not paste fabricated quotes from a chatbot into their articles. The responsibility of the former doesn't negate the responsibility of the latter.
I can't just submit shit work all day long then blame QA when some of it goes through. That's like a burglar saying it's the cops fault that people got burglared.
Is it normal/expected for a news organization to publish that they fired someone? I’m inclined to take the ‘don’t comment on personnel matters’ at face value.
They did report on the article quote sourcing debacle at the time - perhaps not as quickly as some would’ve liked, but within a couple of days.
Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore.
It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened.
I also want to note that, this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to.
> this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to.
They never really announced Peter Bright leaving ArsTechnica either though. At least not until much much later.
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I don't know what you're basing that on.
It seems entirely normal and standard to retract articles and publish a note elsewhere that it was retracted. In fact, it's common because if an article had one fabrication it might have others which you haven't discovered yet, so you don't want to keep it up.
Whether they want to announce that the journalist was fired is up to their discretion. But it's not necessary or even normal.
I don't know why you're talking about a "mark", a "scar", that "immortalizes". That's weird and frankly a little disturbing. The journalist got fired and the article got taken down and a note was made by the editor. That's accountability working as intended. I don't know why you want more than that.
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No. That can happen but it’s not the only path. An article can be retracted. That said, it’s usually noted somewhere else.
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If a news organization publishes an article welcoming someone onboard, they should also do that when someone is fired because of a scandal.
Of course, if someone leaves because of personal reasons or jumping ship, there is no reason to do that. But this is different.
Sorta. Usually they would do a press release or a post on their company blog - not an article.
Aside, posting about a new hire is easy and has no legal livability. Posting on a departure can be a tangled web.
I do agree that some note by Ars would be good here.
The complications of HR policy and law do not allow for your proposed solution.
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The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even). Here's an example:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo
I think they're an outlier, but still I was disappointed by Ars's response. They deleted the article and didn't detail what was wrong with it at all. Felt like a cover-up.
To be completely fair, BBC news is effectively a different organisation which has the BBC name. There's a fairly good overview of it here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko
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> They deleted the article
This was a big disappointment. I read the original article and the comment from the source highlighting the error, knew what was wrong with it, and still think it was the wrong move to just delete the article and all the original comments, and replace it with an editorial note.
This is a kind of cover-up. It's impossible to hide the issue but they went to great lengths to soften the optics and remove the damning content from the public record. They obscured the magnitude of the error. It looks like another "person uses AI and gets some details wrong".
What they did so far, the decisions that allowed the issue to occur in the first place (e.g. no editorial review before publishing) and the first reaction to deal with the incident (just destroy the content, article and comments) is everything I need to know about the journalistic principles at ArsTechnica. it's a major loss of trust for me.
They’re at this level because the editors have always had low standers.
I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading.
They’ve had this problem for years. They will publish anything that gets them clicks. They do not care if a writer makes things up. They do not care if their headlines are misleading - in fact, that’s the point. They clearly got into the job in order to influence and manipulate people.
They’re bad people, with terrible motivations, and unchecked power. They only walk back when something really really bad happens.
Never trust an Ars headline.
> They’re at this level because the editors have always had low standers.
It's not just Ars Technica. I would go as far as saying the big majority. I work at the biggest alliance of public service media in EU, and my role required me to interact with editors. I often do not like painting with broad brush, but I am yet to meet a humble editor yet. They approach everything with a "I know better than anyone else" attitude. Probably the "public" aspect of the media, but I woupd argue it's editorial aspect too. The rest of the staff are often very nice and down to earth.
> but I am yet to meet a humble editor yet. They approach everything with a "I know better than anyone else" attitude.
They're like "UX experts" in software. One does UX for software, the other does UX for text. Same attitude problems, from the way you describe it. If the expert in something so subjectively judged is seen to be conceding anything, that might undermine their perceived expertise. Any push back is interpreted as somebody challenging their career.
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<< They approach everything with a "I know better than anyone else" attitude.
My charitable read is that if one has to interact with the public, one naturally develops an understanding of what is wrong with it.
Same for the Verge. Sometimes their headline or content contains factual errors. If you point it out in the comment, sometimes they do it properly and add a correction, other times they quietly fix it and delete your comment. So much for their free speech stance and editorial practice.
> "always had low standards"
Always? Or since they were bought by Conde Nast in 2008?
> I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading.
I believe they are doing A/B testing on these.
Ah yes, I remember correctly for once: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-front-page-arti...
TL;DR: They are doing mandatory A/B testing since 2015.
A/B headline testing is just scientific clickbait.
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Example?
> Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article
That's a very "shoot the messenger" statement. While Aurich is the community "face" of Ars, I very much doubt he has the power to do anything like that.
Conde Nasty corrupts eveything.
> There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences.
Exactly! The situation happened, no going back, but they had a choice - to be transparent about it and I am sure people would be appreciative of it, maybe giving them net positive rather than negative, but the choice they have made is a complete opposite and a sign that no one should trust them.
Ars isn't winging it here, they are following Conde Nast HR processes. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-... "I can confirm that the HR processes are intricate and complicated. I can confirm that we have union writers. I can confirm these things take time." -Aurich
There's no point trying to update an article with fake sources. If you can't trust the material, there's no story. I think pulling it was the right move here.
Ars never commented about firing staff before, and it happened on several occasions. You get the occasional article when someone joins, never when someone leaves. They should have published another article after all this, but I would not expect them to comment about staff.
And I think thats a good thing. People screw up, and journalists are people. This person's punishment for their screw up was losing their job. They do not need to be dragged into a hit piece.
Ars can, and probably should if they have not already, publish a piece about hallucinations and use of AI in journalism, and own up to their own lack of appropriate controls and reflections. They do not need to drag the authors name into the write up. It can be self critical of themselves as a journalistic outlet.
Nobody needs to publish a hit piece.
Ars could have just said "After investigation, we reviewed our editorial process. The author of the article is no longer with the company." factually and objectively.
I can't see how this could possibly be a negative or harmful thing.
I note that Ken Fisher did post an editor’s note, Benj did publicly own up to it, and all of this was mentioned in the article.
Republishing an article with corrected quotes is reserved for cases where an editorial team can trust the substance of an article. There is an error but that error doesn’t impact the amount of trust the editorial team has in the article.
A retraction is totally different. It means that an editorial team does not trust any of the underlying article. It’s the biggest stick in journalism and is only reserved for the absolute worst breaches of trust.
When you retract an article and then update the author’s bio to past tense, that’s as clear of a signal as you can ethically send. A publication with clout makes news and writes the first line of people’s obituaries while they’re still alive - a degree of tact, professionalism and newsworthiness comes into play.
Ars is not journalism. It's scraped content to put between ads.
I'm sad to see them fire him. I've seen far worse: I have always approached issues by asking for accountability and improvement. Frankly, he already did: he openly apologised. I was very happy with that, it demonstrated integrity and I remained respecting him.
Even worse,
> I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick) [0]
In an earlier HN thread, I saw someone ask why Ars was requiring staff work while ill. If that's true, if he posted without verification while sick and under pressure, which is implied and plausible, firing looks doubly bad.
Ars has lost a lot of my trust in recent years, with articles seeming far worse. Just like you, I'm sorry to see the editorial position here.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/virtuistic.bsky.social/post/3mey2mq...
You're taking his fever dream excuse at face value, and I think you probably shouldn't. It reads like a lame excuse to deflect personal responsibility, a cynical face-saving tactic.
If the illness was genuine, can he document that he advised management of this fever and they told him to submit an article anyway? It's not his bosses job to stick a thermometer up his ass every morning.
I agree. In my experience, no one cares when you are sick. No one. Maybe your mom, but that's it. Using it as an excuse when you make a mistake is even worse. People value responsibility... "Sorry, my bad, won't happen again", not excuses.
He posted his not very impressive apology as images not text that is easily indexed. I do think that was purposeful and manipulative and very much makes me question his motivation. If I'm missing the original posting in text I'd sure like to know so I can correct this perception.
Ars has probably the most rabid anti-AI audience of all the tech publications
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It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.
I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.
All they had to do was write a clear and simple message saying that one of their staff was responsible, has been fired, and they'll take steps to avoid this in future.
Their actions so far just make me think they're panicking and found a scapegoat to blame it on, but they're not going to put any new checks in place so it'll just happen again.
It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that.
I feel bad for the guy, but there's just no way I can imagine much better safeguards other than editors paying more close attention to referencing sources, and hiring more reliable people.
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AnonC doesn't seem to be upset that the journalist was fired. The disappointment comes from Ars trying to brush this entire situation away by deleting articles, comments, and making no statement on their website.
My understanding is that AnonC is upset at Ars not taking the mature approach by allowing this to become a learning moment for the employee and using it to double down and confirm their stance on AI generated content. There's strength in maturity. But I am doing some reading between the lines, and I'm possibly reading a bit too much into "There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues"
Reminds me of a story I was told as an intern deploying infra changes to prod for the first time. Some guy had accidentally caused hours of downtime, and was expecting to be fired, only for his boss to say "Those hours of downtime is the price we pay to train our staff (you) to be careful. If we fire you, we throw the investment out the window"
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> It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity above all.
Where I work in healthcare honestly and owning up is encouraged and unless there is major negligence not often punished. They just want to try learn why the mistake happened and look for ways to prevent it going forward. My buddy said for his company if an accident happens WorkSafe is not out to punish as long as they are very forward and honest. Again they want to learn how to avoid it happening again. Punishment only scares others to try hide mistakes.
I think they missed a big opportunity to instead of firing the guy sit him down and stress how not okay this was and that it harms the credibility and he needs to understand that and make a proper apology. They could make him do some education like ethical reporting responsibilities or whatever.
Then like you say not just hide the article but point out the mistakes and corrections. Describe the mistake and how credible reporting is their priority and the author will be given further education to avoid this happening again. They could also make new policies like going forward all articles that use AI for search results must attempt to find a source for that information. This would build trust not harm it in my opinion.
If a doctor intentionally did something that they obviously know is unethical they would be fired too. This was not a "mistake", it is a huge ethical violation.
This is more like writing your buddy a prescription for drugs to take recreationally
I agree. I'd add that the fact he appeared to be working while sick -- and that he pre-emptively and immediately publicly apologised -- means I think he already did behave as he should.
This makes me question Ars not him. Loss of credibility indeed.
> It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
This was from a journalist _who_is_hired_as_expert_ at knowing of/about tooling that hallucinates (LLM ((AI)) chatbots). Decides to implicitly trust said technology to write a "hit piece" (lets be honest it was).
In several territories that would fall under slander and if is untrue is a major journalistic mis-step and career ending faux-pas.
Why in any situation would their position now be defendable?
This is akin to being a journalist of iron-mongering writing a "truth" piece on how "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" (if you don't get my reference here, lucky you). It's outright un-professional.
Blaming it on illness allows everyone to save face, but they were compos mentis enough to hit publish at the time. That itself carries a certain "I'm well enough to agree this is a good article" from said author.
This has just happened - i'm giving Ars a bit more time to come out with a piece examining the situation. They're a pretty good operation, I think. but it they don't...
This. The truth is still putting on its shoes and all that
Yep, Ars Technica is off my reading list. They completely lost my trust.
They're a random tech blog, the kind of website that is peak time waste slop, why would they have any standards? Even the new york times and the Washington post put up wrong things all the time without corrections. People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth. They are there to sell ads, the same way a youtube video of a guy eating too much food in front of a camera is.
Journalism has devolved into content creation in the literal sense of the word, they are just there to put something inside the div with the id "content", to justify the ads around it.
"People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth."
You just changed the meaning of journalist. Now sure, the job of some journalists could be better described as ad sellers, but I rather call those like that and restrict the original term to actual journalists who actually care about truth. Because they still exist.
The 3 people that work at Reuters actually doing journalism are not doing in ANY way a similar job to the millions writing blog posts for Ars Technica like publications. The latter is an ad seller indeed. And the majority of publications that are renowned also do little to no journalism.
It's as if we called "web devs" that learned JS on udemy and just vibe code, Computer Scientists and treated them as if they publish compiler research papers. It's just a completely different job
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It's cuz Ars's roots are in being video game bloggers and graphics card reviewers, not legitimate journalists. They don't have a notion of professionalism or journalistic duty, only virality and juicy takes.
you're participating in a social media site where something like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do something and write this article about it." So put your money where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.