Comment by Aurornis

The root offense wasn’t that this was published. The root problem is that the author submitted an LLM hallucination as a story. He should have faced consequences even if it had been caught.

> This was an institutional error, not an individual reporter's fault.

The person who caused the problem is at fault. It doesn’t help to do mental gymnastics to try to shift blame to a faceless institution. The author is at 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 think you’re putting too much stock into the excuse. The author got caught doing one of the things you cannot do as a journalist: Publishing fake quotes. He was looking for any way to excuse it and make it not his fault so he could try to keep his job.

He made the choice. The consequences are his to bear. If it had been caught before publishing he still should have faced the consequences.