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Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In

by AnonC 7mo 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.

doctorpangloss 7mo ago
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.
petterroea 7mo ago
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.
- esperent 7mo ago
  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.
  - DetroitThrow 7mo ago
    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.
    - esperent 7mo ago
      Yes, those are exactly the kind of steps they would need to publicly commit to in order to retain trust. And yet, instead we get silence, no acceptance that some measure of responsibility falls on the editorial team here. So it's clear they just hope it'll blow over without them having to do anything, which is the opposite of what a trustworthy site would do.
    - tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
      You have to give them time to do the job properly as well. Companies will often pay lip service to standards then squeeze their staff so much those standards are impossible to attain.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      > It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that. More than that, as a reporter on AI he should have been fully aware that AI frequently bullshits and lies. He should have known it was not reliable and that its output needs to be carefully verified by a human if you care at all about the accuracy or quality of what it gives you. His excuse that this was done in a fever induced state of madness feels weak when it was his whole job to know that AI was not an appropriate tool for the task.
      - Barbing 7mo ago
        >his whole job Possibly akin to a roofer taking a shortcut up there, then taking a spill? You knew better but unfortunately let the fact that you could probably get away with it with zero impact decide for you. IIRC hallucinations were essentially kicked off initially by user error, or rather… let’s say at least: a journalist using the best available technologies should have been able to reduce the chance of this big of an issue to near zero, even with language models in the loop & without human review. (e.g. imagine Karpathy’s llm-council with extra harnessing/scripting, so even MORE expensive, but still. Or some RegEx!)
- gertop 7mo ago
  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.
  - petterroea 7mo ago
    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"
    - lynx97 7mo ago
      There is a difference between an error and totally misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no sympathy for journalists getting caught producing hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and should always result in that person being fired.
      - jcgrillo 7mo ago
        Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let that shit through code review, and a customer impacting outage results, that should be instant termination. But it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to be held "blameless" right?
        watwut 7mo ago
        Joirnalist job was not to review ai-slop. That is rather crucial difference.
vpribish 7mo ago
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...
- jmbwell 7mo ago
  This. The truth is still putting on its shoes and all that
14 7mo ago
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.
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  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.
- sumeno 7mo ago
  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
Gagarin1917 7mo ago
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.
- 3abiton 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
    << 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.
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    > 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.
jrmg 7mo ago
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.
- IshKebab 7mo ago
  The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even). Here's an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo 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.
  - buran77 7mo ago
    > 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.
  - d1sxeyes 7mo ago
    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 https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko
    - 7mo ago
vasco 7mo ago
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.
- lukan 7mo ago
  "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.
  - vasco 7mo ago
    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
    - lukan 7mo ago
      Eric Berger at Ars for instance is someone I consider a journalist. Have you proof, that he systematically neglects truth in favor of ad selling?
      - mikkupikku 7mo ago
        Berger is a real one. I'm surprised he's lasted so long at Ars Technica. I think eventually his objective reporting of SpaceX will get the Are Technica reader base to demand his firing, Ars readers are very reddit-like. Team minded, not interested I hearing dispassionate takes. Hearing Elon Musk criticized as a person while simultaneously seeing SpaceX described as a real and highly accomplished company gives reddit/ars readers tonal whiplash, such people prefer simple narratives without nuance. See also, in this very thread, somebody who thinks Berger has a strong pro-musk bias because his reporting and books say that SpaceX are good at what they do.
carabiner 7mo ago
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.
kergonath 7mo ago
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.
- anakaine 7mo ago
  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.
  - g947o 7mo ago
    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.
beloch 7mo ago
"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." ---------- 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.
- b112 7mo ago
  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.
  - ThunderSizzle 7mo ago
    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.
    - katzgrau 7mo ago
      I think you missed the point of the parent comment. The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta). It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff. Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k. That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.
vintagedave 7mo ago
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/3mey2mqvny22o https://bsky.app/profile/virtuistic.bsky.social/post/3mey2mq...
- Paddyz 7mo ago
  [dead]
- bmurphy1976 7mo ago
  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.
  - vintagedave 7mo ago
    In fairness, people often do this in order to have a full statement visible, not a portion, not spread over multiple posts, etc. I'm not saying you're wrong. I just caution that jumping to 'purposeful' (re not easily indexed), 'manipulative' etc is a very strong leap. I also found the post by searching for a quote from it, so I think images with text likely are indexed. I can't imagine in 2026 they wouldn't be.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  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.
ChrisSD 7mo ago
> 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.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Iirc he manages the CMS, he might literally be the only person with the power. Authority is something else.
rob_c 7mo ago
> 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.
- vor_ 7mo ago
  I wouldn't characterize the story as a hit piece; the misquotes didn't distort his position. What happened is the LLM accurately summarized his position, but they weren't actually his words in the quotes.
xnx 7mo ago
Ars is not journalism. It's scraped content to put between ads.
- mmmpetrichor 7mo ago
  I disagree strongly. I've found that they have more journalistic integrity than most mainstream news pages. Did you see the extremely strong post from the senior editor after this AI hallucination was discovered in a published story? And then the reporter was dismissed.
elAhmo 7mo ago
> 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.
- smallerize 7mo ago
  Ars isn't winging it here, they are following Conde Nast HR processes. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/post-44262774 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
zombot 7mo ago
Yep, Ars Technica is off my reading list. They completely lost my trust.
jmbwell 7mo ago
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.
radiohead89 7mo ago
> It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level. They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity above all.
Hnrobert42 7mo ago
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?
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - madamelic 7mo ago
    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.
    - lich_king 7mo ago
      It is not a job of the editor to assume that the author is lying to you. > This was an institutional error, not an individual reporter's fault. Ah yes, "the system made me use AI".
hluska 7mo ago
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.
smallerize 7mo ago
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.
calyth2018 7mo ago
Conde Nasty corrupts eveything.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
dust-jacket 7mo ago
I absolutely disagree. This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened. Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".
- chrisjj 7mo ago
  > Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. Because the retraction notice hid the article name and the author name?
tw85 7mo ago
I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it, but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people defended this course of non-action by saying it was the sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become witnesses in the trial.
didntknowya 7mo ago
why should ars technica have to publish grovelling apologies to satisfy their readers. it's not a tabloid. and as it's obviously a HR issue both parties are restricted to what they can say, if they want to provide more details on their personal feeds and people are interested they can find out respectively.

by AnonC 7mo ago

doctorpangloss 7mo ago

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.

petterroea 7mo ago

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.

esperent 7mo ago
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.
- DetroitThrow 7mo ago
  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.
  - esperent 7mo ago
    Yes, those are exactly the kind of steps they would need to publicly commit to in order to retain trust. And yet, instead we get silence, no acceptance that some measure of responsibility falls on the editorial team here. So it's clear they just hope it'll blow over without them having to do anything, which is the opposite of what a trustworthy site would do.
  - tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
    You have to give them time to do the job properly as well. Companies will often pay lip service to standards then squeeze their staff so much those standards are impossible to attain.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    > It was against their policy to use AI in producing any part of the final article, and the writer was aware of that. More than that, as a reporter on AI he should have been fully aware that AI frequently bullshits and lies. He should have known it was not reliable and that its output needs to be carefully verified by a human if you care at all about the accuracy or quality of what it gives you. His excuse that this was done in a fever induced state of madness feels weak when it was his whole job to know that AI was not an appropriate tool for the task.
    - Barbing 7mo ago
      >his whole job Possibly akin to a roofer taking a shortcut up there, then taking a spill? You knew better but unfortunately let the fact that you could probably get away with it with zero impact decide for you. IIRC hallucinations were essentially kicked off initially by user error, or rather… let’s say at least: a journalist using the best available technologies should have been able to reduce the chance of this big of an issue to near zero, even with language models in the loop & without human review. (e.g. imagine Karpathy’s llm-council with extra harnessing/scripting, so even MORE expensive, but still. Or some RegEx!)
gertop 7mo ago
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.
- petterroea 7mo ago
  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"
  - lynx97 7mo ago
    There is a difference between an error and totally misunderstand your actual task. I have absolutely no sympathy for journalists getting caught producing hallucinated articles. Thats an absolute no go, and should always result in that person being fired.
    - jcgrillo 7mo ago
      Same goes for engineers reviewing vibeslop. If you let that shit through code review, and a customer impacting outage results, that should be instant termination. But it won't be, because as an engineer you are supposed to be held "blameless" right?
      - watwut 7mo ago
        Joirnalist job was not to review ai-slop. That is rather crucial difference.

vpribish 7mo ago

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...

jmbwell 7mo ago
This. The truth is still putting on its shoes and all that

14 7mo ago

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.

vintagedave 7mo ago
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.
sumeno 7mo ago
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

Gagarin1917 7mo ago

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.

3abiton 7mo ago
> 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.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
  << 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.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  > 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.

jrmg 7mo ago

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.

IshKebab 7mo ago
The BBC reports on itself quite well (maybe too much even). Here's an example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly51dzw86wo 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.
- buran77 7mo ago
  > 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.
- d1sxeyes 7mo ago
  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 https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c80l3074mgko
  - 7mo ago

vasco 7mo ago

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.

lukan 7mo ago
"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.
- vasco 7mo ago
  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
  - lukan 7mo ago
    Eric Berger at Ars for instance is someone I consider a journalist. Have you proof, that he systematically neglects truth in favor of ad selling?
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      Berger is a real one. I'm surprised he's lasted so long at Ars Technica. I think eventually his objective reporting of SpaceX will get the Are Technica reader base to demand his firing, Ars readers are very reddit-like. Team minded, not interested I hearing dispassionate takes. Hearing Elon Musk criticized as a person while simultaneously seeing SpaceX described as a real and highly accomplished company gives reddit/ars readers tonal whiplash, such people prefer simple narratives without nuance. See also, in this very thread, somebody who thinks Berger has a strong pro-musk bias because his reporting and books say that SpaceX are good at what they do.

carabiner 7mo ago

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.

kergonath 7mo ago

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.

anakaine 7mo ago
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.
- g947o 7mo ago
  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.

beloch 7mo ago

"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." ---------- 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.

b112 7mo ago
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.
- ThunderSizzle 7mo ago
  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.
  - katzgrau 7mo ago
    I think you missed the point of the parent comment. The money (from advertising) that used to go to news now goes elsewhere (Google and Meta). It’s left very little in terms of resources for staff. Think about what the quality of commercial software would be like if there wasn’t enough money for QA and testers and top tier devs capped out at $180k with starting roles at 30k and 40k. That’s the news industry right now. Poorer quality product.

vintagedave 7mo ago

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/3mey2mqvny22o https://bsky.app/profile/virtuistic.bsky.social/post/3mey2mq...

Paddyz 7mo ago
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bmurphy1976 7mo ago
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.
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  In fairness, people often do this in order to have a full statement visible, not a portion, not spread over multiple posts, etc. I'm not saying you're wrong. I just caution that jumping to 'purposeful' (re not easily indexed), 'manipulative' etc is a very strong leap. I also found the post by searching for a quote from it, so I think images with text likely are indexed. I can't imagine in 2026 they wouldn't be.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
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.

ChrisSD 7mo ago

> 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.

bombcar 7mo ago
Iirc he manages the CMS, he might literally be the only person with the power. Authority is something else.

rob_c 7mo ago

> 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.

vor_ 7mo ago
I wouldn't characterize the story as a hit piece; the misquotes didn't distort his position. What happened is the LLM accurately summarized his position, but they weren't actually his words in the quotes.

xnx 7mo ago

Ars is not journalism. It's scraped content to put between ads.

mmmpetrichor 7mo ago
I disagree strongly. I've found that they have more journalistic integrity than most mainstream news pages. Did you see the extremely strong post from the senior editor after this AI hallucination was discovered in a published story? And then the reporter was dismissed.

elAhmo 7mo ago

> 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.

smallerize 7mo ago
Ars isn't winging it here, they are following Conde Nast HR processes. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations.1511671/post-44262774 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

zombot 7mo ago

Yep, Ars Technica is off my reading list. They completely lost my trust.

jmbwell 7mo ago

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.

radiohead89 7mo ago

> It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level. They had to do this. You have to have journalistic integrity above all.

Hnrobert42 7mo ago

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?

Aurornis 7mo ago
> 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.
- madamelic 7mo ago
  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.
  - lich_king 7mo ago
    It is not a job of the editor to assume that the author is lying to you. > This was an institutional error, not an individual reporter's fault. Ah yes, "the system made me use AI".

hluska 7mo ago

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.

smallerize 7mo ago

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.

calyth2018 7mo ago

Conde Nasty corrupts eveything.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

dust-jacket 7mo ago

I absolutely disagree. This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened. Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".

chrisjj 7mo ago
> Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. Because the retraction notice hid the article name and the author name?

tw85 7mo ago

I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it, but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people defended this course of non-action by saying it was the sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become witnesses in the trial.

didntknowya 7mo ago

why should ars technica have to publish grovelling apologies to satisfy their readers. it's not a tabloid. and as it's obviously a HR issue both parties are restricted to what they can say, if they want to provide more details on their personal feeds and people are interested they can find out respectively.