8 ms·

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

308 points by bikenaga 8mo ago

usefulposter 8mo ago
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.
- icegreentea2 8mo ago
  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.
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    > 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.
    - icegreentea2 8mo ago
      Yeah, the initial comments are pretty glazey, but go to the second and third pages of comments (ars default sorts by time). I'll pull some quotes: > If there is a thread for redundant comments, I think this is the one. I, too, will want to see substantially more followup here, ideally this week. My subscription is at stake. > I know Aurich said that a statement would be coming next week, due to the weekend and a public holiday, so I appreciate that a first statement came earlier. [...] Personally, I would expect Ars to not work with the authors in the future > (from Jim Salter, a former writer at Ars) That's good to hear. But frankly, this is still the kind of "isolated incident" that should be considered an immediate firing offense. > Echoing others that I’m waiting to see if Ars properly and publicly reckons with what happened here before I hit the “cancel subscription” button
    - arduanika 8mo ago
      No reason to trust that the comment section is any more genuine than the deleted fake article. If an Ars employee used genAI to astroturf these comments, they clearly would not be fired for it or even called out by name.
      - knowitnone3 8mo ago
        [dead]
- malfist 8mo ago
  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.
  - add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
    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.
  - misnome 8mo ago
    > That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions. Sounds optional.
    - throw3e98 8mo ago
      Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
      - lapcat 8mo ago
        > It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process. That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door. Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk. Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.
anonymous908213 8mo ago
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.
- maxbond 8mo ago
  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."
add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
> 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.
- esseph 8mo ago
  > 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.
j0057 8mo ago
Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/page-2 https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-... The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
- rstuart4133 8mo ago
  The articles authors are listed on that page as: Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland.
- NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  > Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. Not at all. Whitewash.
- randallsquared 8mo ago
  > 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?
  - adobesubmarine 8mo ago
    In academic publishing the normal way to handle a retraction is to flag the article as retracted, not delete it. Partly that's a legacy thing from print media (you can publish a notice of retraction but you can't un-publish a physical journal copy). But it's also about traceability; you don't get to pretend you never messed up by putting the article out in the first place.
andrewflnr 8mo ago
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.
- skybrian 8mo ago
  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.
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    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
    - maxbond 8mo ago
      No one said it was defensible. They drew a distinction between incompetence and malice. Let's not misquote each other here in the comments.
      - anonymous908213 8mo ago
        Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal that (ostensibly) exists for the reason of presenting factual information to readers, you are engaging in a second layer of malicious intent. It would take an astounding level of incompetence for a tech journal writer to not be aware of the fact that LLMs do not generate factual output reliably, and it beggars belief given that one of the authors has worked at Ars for 14 years. If they are that incompetent, they should probably be fired on that basis anyways. But even if they are that incompetent, that still only covers one half of their malicious intent.
unethical_ban 8mo ago
Who got fired?
- netsharc 8mo ago
  The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not..
  - maxbond 8mo ago
    They're both still on the staff page presently. https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
    - throw3e98 8mo ago
      This is a US holiday weekend and lots of people are going to be on weekend vacations. Check back on Wednesday.
      - g947o 8mo ago
        Then they should take their time publishing this statement. Nobody is in a hurry.
    - cozzyd 8mo ago
      Yeah the problem is we understood AI reporter as reporting on AI not by AI.
- zmmmmm 8mo ago
  The lack of specificity to me suggests that someone probably is getting fired. It is written as if legal vetted every word.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
mzajc 8mo ago
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?
- g947o 8mo ago
  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.
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  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).
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
mrandish 8mo ago
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-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ 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-me-part-2/ 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.
- 8mo ago
jmward01 8mo ago
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.
- vor_ 8mo ago
  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.
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    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.
  - jmward01 8mo ago
    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?
sevg 8mo ago
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.
- Hnrobert42 8mo ago
  Unsubscribing from the free RSS feed. If you weren't paying or consuming ads, I'm not sure how much your vote should count.
  - sevg 8mo ago
    So I can only share my opinion about Ars if I’m a paying subscriber? XD
  - rsynnott 8mo ago
    This sort of publication lives or dies on mindshare.
delichon 8mo ago
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.
- ezst 8mo ago
  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.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  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.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
QuadrupleA 8mo ago
Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.
- Jordan-117 8mo ago
  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.
knowitnone3 8mo ago
[dead]
water-data-dude 8mo ago
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 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
- gdulli 8mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- bojan 8mo ago
  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.
  - 0_____0 8mo ago
    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.
  - wavemode 8mo ago
    tbh that's the least surprising aspect of this. Most journalists do not have work-life balance.
  - 8mo ago
icegreentea2 8mo ago
Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p 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).
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- sva_ 8mo ago
  Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
  - belter 8mo ago
    He did not even mentioned the Dow...
  - vor_ 8mo ago
    What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
    - overfeed 8mo ago
      Not say anything at all.
      - DonHopkins 8mo ago
        [flagged]
    - m-hodges 8mo ago
      We operate in an information environment where this is exceedingly rare. Shame is hard to come by these days.
    - oenton 8mo ago
      The DOW is at 50,000! 50,000! If you get this reference (and even if you don’t), there are many alternative actions he could have taken, including not acknowledging this at all.
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Previously: Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer; pulls story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059
dang 8mo ago
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=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (602 comments) AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 comments) The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (945 comments) AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (746 comments)
vor_ 8mo ago
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.
- skybrian 8mo ago
  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.
  - Barrin92 8mo ago
    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.
    - skybrian 8mo ago
      The New Yorker famously has separate fact checkers, but I'm not sure how many other news organizations do?
      - starkparker 8mo ago
        Ah, the New Yorker. That's a Condé Nast publication too, just like Ars. There have been any labor incidents involving fact checkers and Condé Nast at the New Yorker recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/21/conde-nast-new-yorker-firings-labor-dispute/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/21/conde-nas...
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
ilamont 8mo ago
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.
- fooqux 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - OJFord 8mo ago
    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 https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
    - dvhh 8mo ago
      looking at the statement, I find it weird that Benj Edwards is trying very hard to remove the blame from Kyle Orland, Even if he is not directly responsible.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
        Not weird. Kyle will take a massive career hit, as a result of this. I’d say that some of the onus is on Kyle, anyway, as he should vet anything he slaps his name on (I do), but it sounds like he really didn’t have anything to do with it. Despite the aspersions against the company for their sick time policy (which might actually be valid), the other corporate pressure might be to force their employees to incorporate AI tools into their work. That’s become quite common, these days.
laurex 8mo ago
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..."
- shadowgovt 8mo ago
  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.
  - dcrazy 8mo ago
    I was puzzled by your claim that Condé Nast was forced to vacate its headquarters last year. After some Googling, it seems you are referring to their English offices. Condé Nast is still headquartered at One World Trade as it has been since 2014, and is still owned by the Staten Island-based Advance Publications as it has been since 1959.
- Jordan-117 8mo ago
  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.
  - Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
    > There's no indication Edwards knowingly, deliberately invented quotes. It was a clumsy mistake. Signing off on an article that 'quotes' someone by hallucination? I would say that, for a journalist- especially on ars - is slightly more than 'clumsy'.
dmitrygr 8mo ago
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.
- giobox 8mo ago
  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.nytimes.com/section/corrections https://www.wsj.com/news/types/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.
  - hed 8mo ago
    Exactly. And they don’t just rip down the old article but annotate it with a disclaimer that an earlier version said XXX
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  ... This is the first official retraction you've seen? Eh? All proper newspapers do them fairly regularly.
petterroea 8mo ago
> 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
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
singpolyma3 8mo ago
Did you fire the writer? No? Then what.
ChocMontePy 8mo ago
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-me/ 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 https://archive.md/8VPMw
Rapzid 8mo ago
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.
hysan 8mo ago
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-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ 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.
iamtedd 8mo ago
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.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://web.archive.org/web/20260214134656/https://news.ycom...
lich_king 8mo ago
> 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.
mskogly 8mo ago
The original piece was signed by BENJ EDWARDS AND KYLE ORLAND I find it odd that Ars sees a need to protect such sloppy work. https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
TomMasz 8mo ago
Isn't this the sort of thing editors are supposed to catch before publication? It's good that they retracted the article and apologized to the person who was falsely quoted, but it still managed to appear before someone caught it.

308 points by bikenaga 8mo ago

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.

icegreentea2 8mo ago
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.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  > 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.
  - icegreentea2 8mo ago
    Yeah, the initial comments are pretty glazey, but go to the second and third pages of comments (ars default sorts by time). I'll pull some quotes: > If there is a thread for redundant comments, I think this is the one. I, too, will want to see substantially more followup here, ideally this week. My subscription is at stake. > I know Aurich said that a statement would be coming next week, due to the weekend and a public holiday, so I appreciate that a first statement came earlier. [...] Personally, I would expect Ars to not work with the authors in the future > (from Jim Salter, a former writer at Ars) That's good to hear. But frankly, this is still the kind of "isolated incident" that should be considered an immediate firing offense. > Echoing others that I’m waiting to see if Ars properly and publicly reckons with what happened here before I hit the “cancel subscription” button
  - arduanika 8mo ago
    No reason to trust that the comment section is any more genuine than the deleted fake article. If an Ars employee used genAI to astroturf these comments, they clearly would not be fired for it or even called out by name.
    - knowitnone3 8mo ago
      [dead]
malfist 8mo ago
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.
- add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
  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.
- misnome 8mo ago
  > That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions. Sounds optional.
  - throw3e98 8mo ago
    Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.
    - lapcat 8mo ago
      > It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process. That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door. Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk. Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.

anonymous908213 8mo ago

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.

maxbond 8mo ago
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."

add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago

> 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.

esseph 8mo ago
> 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.

j0057 8mo ago

Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/page-2 https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-... The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...

rstuart4133 8mo ago
The articles authors are listed on that page as: Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland.
NedF 8mo ago
[dead]
chrisjj 8mo ago
> Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. Not at all. Whitewash.
randallsquared 8mo ago
> 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?
- adobesubmarine 8mo ago
  In academic publishing the normal way to handle a retraction is to flag the article as retracted, not delete it. Partly that's a legacy thing from print media (you can publish a notice of retraction but you can't un-publish a physical journal copy). But it's also about traceability; you don't get to pretend you never messed up by putting the article out in the first place.

andrewflnr 8mo ago

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.

skybrian 8mo ago
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.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  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
  - maxbond 8mo ago
    No one said it was defensible. They drew a distinction between incompetence and malice. Let's not misquote each other here in the comments.
    - anonymous908213 8mo ago
      Even if it didn't fabricate quotes wholesale, taking an LLM's output and claiming it as your own writing is textbook plagiarism, which is malicious intent. Then, if you know that LLMs are next-token-prediction-engines that have no concept of "truth" and are programmed solely to generate probabilistically-likely text with no specific mechanism of anchoring to "reality" or "facts", and you use that output in a journal that (ostensibly) exists for the reason of presenting factual information to readers, you are engaging in a second layer of malicious intent. It would take an astounding level of incompetence for a tech journal writer to not be aware of the fact that LLMs do not generate factual output reliably, and it beggars belief given that one of the authors has worked at Ars for 14 years. If they are that incompetent, they should probably be fired on that basis anyways. But even if they are that incompetent, that still only covers one half of their malicious intent.

unethical_ban 8mo ago

Who got fired?

netsharc 8mo ago
The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not..
- maxbond 8mo ago
  They're both still on the staff page presently. https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
  - throw3e98 8mo ago
    This is a US holiday weekend and lots of people are going to be on weekend vacations. Check back on Wednesday.
    - g947o 8mo ago
      Then they should take their time publishing this statement. Nobody is in a hurry.
  - cozzyd 8mo ago
    Yeah the problem is we understood AI reporter as reporting on AI not by AI.
zmmmmm 8mo ago
The lack of specificity to me suggests that someone probably is getting fired. It is written as if legal vetted every word.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

mzajc 8mo ago

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?

g947o 8mo ago
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.
rsynnott 8mo ago
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).

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

mrandish 8mo ago

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-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ 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-me-part-2/ 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.

8mo ago

jmward01 8mo ago

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.

vor_ 8mo ago
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.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  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.
- jmward01 8mo ago
  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?

sevg 8mo ago

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.

Hnrobert42 8mo ago
Unsubscribing from the free RSS feed. If you weren't paying or consuming ads, I'm not sure how much your vote should count.
- sevg 8mo ago
  So I can only share my opinion about Ars if I’m a paying subscriber? XD
- rsynnott 8mo ago
  This sort of publication lives or dies on mindshare.

delichon 8mo ago

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.

ezst 8mo ago
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.
anonymous908213 8mo ago
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.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

QuadrupleA 8mo ago

Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.

Jordan-117 8mo ago
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.

knowitnone3 8mo ago

[dead]

water-data-dude 8mo ago

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 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

gdulli 8mo ago
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.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
bojan 8mo ago
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.
- 0_____0 8mo ago
  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.
- wavemode 8mo ago
  tbh that's the least surprising aspect of this. Most journalists do not have work-life balance.
- 8mo ago

icegreentea2 8mo ago

Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p 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).

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
sva_ 8mo ago
Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
- belter 8mo ago
  He did not even mentioned the Dow...
- vor_ 8mo ago
  What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
  - overfeed 8mo ago
    Not say anything at all.
    - DonHopkins 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  - m-hodges 8mo ago
    We operate in an information environment where this is exceedingly rare. Shame is hard to come by these days.
  - oenton 8mo ago
    The DOW is at 50,000! 50,000! If you get this reference (and even if you don’t), there are many alternative actions he could have taken, including not acknowledging this at all.

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Previously: Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer; pulls story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059

dang 8mo ago

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=47009949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (602 comments) AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 comments) The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments) An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (945 comments) AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (746 comments)

vor_ 8mo ago

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.

skybrian 8mo ago
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.
- Barrin92 8mo ago
  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.
  - skybrian 8mo ago
    The New Yorker famously has separate fact checkers, but I'm not sure how many other news organizations do?
    - starkparker 8mo ago
      Ah, the New Yorker. That's a Condé Nast publication too, just like Ars. There have been any labor incidents involving fact checkers and Condé Nast at the New Yorker recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/21/conde-nast-new-yorker-firings-labor-dispute/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/21/conde-nas...
- direwolf20 8mo ago

ilamont 8mo ago

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.

fooqux 8mo ago
> 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.
- OJFord 8mo ago
  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 https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
  - dvhh 8mo ago
    looking at the statement, I find it weird that Benj Edwards is trying very hard to remove the blame from Kyle Orland, Even if he is not directly responsible.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
      Not weird. Kyle will take a massive career hit, as a result of this. I’d say that some of the onus is on Kyle, anyway, as he should vet anything he slaps his name on (I do), but it sounds like he really didn’t have anything to do with it. Despite the aspersions against the company for their sick time policy (which might actually be valid), the other corporate pressure might be to force their employees to incorporate AI tools into their work. That’s become quite common, these days.

laurex 8mo ago

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..."

shadowgovt 8mo ago
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.
- dcrazy 8mo ago
  I was puzzled by your claim that Condé Nast was forced to vacate its headquarters last year. After some Googling, it seems you are referring to their English offices. Condé Nast is still headquartered at One World Trade as it has been since 2014, and is still owned by the Staten Island-based Advance Publications as it has been since 1959.
Jordan-117 8mo ago
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.
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
  > There's no indication Edwards knowingly, deliberately invented quotes. It was a clumsy mistake. Signing off on an article that 'quotes' someone by hallucination? I would say that, for a journalist- especially on ars - is slightly more than 'clumsy'.

dmitrygr 8mo ago

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.

giobox 8mo ago
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.nytimes.com/section/corrections https://www.wsj.com/news/types/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.
- hed 8mo ago
  Exactly. And they don’t just rip down the old article but annotate it with a disclaimer that an earlier version said XXX
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
rsynnott 8mo ago
... This is the first official retraction you've seen? Eh? All proper newspapers do them fairly regularly.

petterroea 8mo ago

> 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

cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]

singpolyma3 8mo ago

Did you fire the writer? No? Then what.

ChocMontePy 8mo ago

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-me/ 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 https://archive.md/8VPMw

Rapzid 8mo ago

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.

hysan 8mo ago

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-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ 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.

iamtedd 8mo ago

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.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 https://web.archive.org/web/20260214134656/https://news.ycom...

lich_king 8mo ago

> 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.

mskogly 8mo ago

The original piece was signed by BENJ EDWARDS AND KYLE ORLAND I find it odd that Ars sees a need to protect such sloppy work. https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...

TomMasz 8mo ago

Isn't this the sort of thing editors are supposed to catch before publication? It's good that they retracted the article and apologized to the person who was falsely quoted, but it still managed to appear before someone caught it.