AI generated quotes in a story about AI clanker writing a blog post about a human developer because they didn’t accept their code contributions.
How deep can someone go here.
Now somebody needs to post about this on Reddit, so The Verge can make an AI generated piece based on the post!
🎶It’s the ciiiiiiircle of slooooooooop🎶
I’m always surprised online journals still ask for subscriptions with a straight face for the quality they put out. Someone making shit up on Reddit is probably more factually correct.
In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/
I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or
Dan[edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.Honestly, this whole thing surprises me. I have a lot of respect for Ars Technica. I hope they clean this up and prevent further issues in the future.
What do they have to investigate? Did one of them accidentally get an AI to write the article and then accidentally post the article, like they just fell on the keyboard and accidentally typed in a prompt? Come on.
I would hazard to guess they are investigating how the use of AI was missed in their editorial process, how they missed the incorrect quotes, and who violated their journalistic standards by using an AI to directly write article text since it’s a coauthored piece.
They know how and why it happened, they are taking the weekend to investigate how to best take their foot from their mouths without eating too much shit
This shouldn’t be a problem anatomically, it’s hard to eat anything with a foot in your mouth anyway
Benj and Kyle were the authors of the article; Dan’s name wasn’t on it.
BenJ had coauthor credit on it.
Benj was an author: 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/
Though in the Ars response they say “Scott’s post”, so I’m confused.
Scott is the human subject of the article, who was misquoted by Ars and maligned by the slopbot.
I’m betting it’s definitely Ben since he is pretty pro-AI
I pointed out a month ago that Ars Technica is a rot site and starting to be filled with AI regurgitated bullshit and got 80+ down votes and a few uneducated replies.
Y’all feel better now?
No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an “internet rot site” is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.
You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?
You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.
It’s been going downhill for some time. I think the Condé Nast investment pretty much killed it. The last unnecessary site redesign that didn’t work correctly and made things unreadable was the last straw for me. I took it out of my rotation of “daily reads” and haven’t missed it.
It’s one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an “internet rot site.”
My point still stands.
You can argue that EVERY fucking thing in the world is in the beginning , mid, or late stages of enshittification.
But calling Ars an internet rot site, at this stage, is just fucking stupid.
Are they as good as they were a few years ago? I honestly can’t say. I do know that there was better news a few years ago.
The people at Ars have a tough job trying to navigate this modern world of oligarchs and autocracy, keeping their identity, while being owned by a corporation whose only job is to make money.
They’ve done a pretty good fucking job, all things considered, of staying their course.
A much better job than internet assholes who want to act elitist and whine when the world falls apart around them while they blame their fellow class instead of the controlling class.
They are failing at basic editorial controls. This is not a “pretty good fucking job.” It is a sign of real decline.
Right.
And what do you know about editorial controls or how journalism has worked in the last 20 years?
Wake up. The decline has already happened. It’s now a game of compromise.
You want to complain and whine like these guys are sitting on a beach, sipping mai thais, while telling their AI agents to write an article.
It’s ignorant and inflammatory. Just makes y’all look petulant.
@sartalon @technology Yeah, I have a lot more trust in the reputation that Ars has built over a decade of solid reliable tech journalism than I do in a random matplotlib maintainer - I’ve interacted with maintainers before. They’re not wrong about agents, but not sure how that’s any different from any human doing the same.
Ars has been around since the mid 1990s. Granted the sale to Conde Nast changed them slowly over time, as well as broadening the focus significantly, but it was likely a case of grow or die since the PC nerd market isn’t anywhere near what it used to be.
Simp a little harder for them next time. They appreciate it.
Weren’t you whining about other people making comments like this one to you?
Apparently you still can’t criticise the Holy Ars even when they put out AI slop articles, because that’s SPITTING ON BABIES
Ars hasn’t been good in a few years. Fuck those people.
Stuff like this makes me very sympathetic to lemmy instances that disable downvotes
I read the comment, then judge the comment and use that judgement and voting scores to judge the community.
Downvotes are just samethink fuel.
Yeah. In my experience upvotes/downvotes often have very little to do with the actual quality of a comment and more to do with how much it conforms with the current political zeitgeist of whatever community you’re participating in. The converse of this is that low quality comments telling people who disagree to go F themselves may also get upvotes.
Yeah, the “platonic ideal downvote” is only supposed to be used for content that “doesn’t contribute to the conversation” or whatever, but that is very often just not the case. There’s even research on how downvotes easily lead to a bandwagon effect: here’s a blog post on this, based on a research article.
Hmm, I should probably create a Beehaw account and move over there. It’s a shame that account migration really isn’t a thing on Lemmy
Interesting I didn’t realize there was research on this stuff. Yeah maybe I should go to beehaw too. Blahaj is another one that disables downvotes. It’s true theres no full account migration but theres ways to export your settings and subscription etc to a new community (see this or this). Apparently theres also ways to link two accounts for a persistent identity, by putting the other accounts username in your bio or something, but I don’t know a lot about that.
That poor guy, the ai is just ganging up on him
I hope it’s the first proof of general AI consciousness.
It would be nice if he decides to sue ars technica for that. Writers and publisher need to learn the hard way that you can’t use ai and trust that for publishing stuff that needs factual coherence. If not by ethics, let it be from fear of lawsuits.
Sue them for what? He would have to prove damages and they took it down.
Libel. Taking it down doesn’t undo the damage to reputation which libel is concerned with. They might not get any monetary damages awarded but could maybe force Ars to put out a retraction.
As much as I would like to see that happen paying to fight a court case against Conde Nast just to get a retraction that they will stick somewhere invisible doesn’t really sound like a winning formula.
Letting them win because you’ve conceded before even playing is also a losing formula. Even if they don’t get awarded monetary damages they can probably at least get their legal expenses covered.
They pulled the article. What more are you hoping for?
could maybe force Ars to put out a retraction
To what end?
How about getting them to put an “e” after the “s” in their name instead?
In the US, libel requires you to prove that the writer knew that what they were writing is not true and that they did it to hurt you. Doing lazy research and trusting an AI is not going to meet that standard.
They didn’t do lazy research. They didn’t do any research, the lazy bums. They put a pump into an AI copy and pasted the output into a blog post and hit post. The only way they could have done less work is if they’d integrated the AI into the website to save them have to do the copy and paste.
They put out a retraction: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/
Publicly making false statements using his name isn’t a crime by itself in his jurisdiction?
No, there are a bunch of things required to be met in the US for libel and a bunch of precedent which is why it’s hard to sue for it and succeed
Which ars writer was the article attributed to?
Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland
Damn. I thought Kyle would do better smh
Ars is just AI slop now? Sad.
“Alexa, slander this man for me”
Welcome to discourse in a post-truth society. Reality doesn’t matter anymore; news agencies can just make shit up, and even the comments on the fake articles are fake.
Rail against it, until it’s the only thing you ever do. A single bot can still post a thousand times more, and on a thousand different accounts, and on a thousand different platforms. Just one of them can formulate fake ideas and then fake arguments with itself that enfold like a fractal, and there is an effectively infinite number of them.
Kessler Syndrome is happening before our very eyes, only on a much more local scale.
This ad was brought to you by OpenAI.
Hard to keep track of all the recent changes in media ownership, editorial and quality control. Would love a browser plugin to give me an indicator because on the rare occasion I read a publication in say, USA, it might have had a good rep last time I read it several years ago. I imagine managing the detailed scores that a plugin might pull from would be a mammoth task, though.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ars-technica/ gives a factual reporting score and political bias estimation.
Unless israel is involved
No way, MBFC utter garbage.
It is one random guys opinion and pushes pro-Zionist content. It’s extremely biased and unfairly rates sites all the time. To see it still pushed after the .world/c/world fiasco is disheartening.
You could share sources about this?
What is the fiasco you refer to?
Mods put in a MBFC bot, everyone saw how shitty and biased it was and rallied against it, mods tried to say the admins forced them to do it, the admins said they didn’t, mods refused to change it despite all that. Eventually after like 6 months of sustained community outrage they got rid of it.
Is AllSides more accurate?
Good recommendation. They have an API and plugins https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/appsextensions/
I was thinking of something that also alerts me to how many times the publication has been found to have published AI under the name of a human. But Media Bias Fact Check might actually cover that well enough. I’ll install that extension now, thank you!
Damn. Am I gonna have to cancel my Ars subscription now? Every damn thing is enshittifying these days
Right? Who’s next, Pro Publica?
It used to be respectable ten years ago, back when it had a .co.uk website too.
This is what you get trying offload all your work on ChatGPT.
Better one is when lawyer tries it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM
Ars Technica has published a retraction
edit: Benj Edwards, the author responsible, has posted his side. tl;dr: He was sick and he messed up, and he asked for the article to be pulled because he was too sick to fix it right away.
At least they owned up to it instead of pretending it didn’t happen like other “news” organizations in the past.
I don’t care he’s “sick”. Too often, someone, instead of taking accountability, just throws anything to maybe shield themselves from actually being fully accountable. “I was sick”, “Family problems”, “A recent death”, “The planets were misaligned that day”, etc.
I find it to still be cowardice, to not stand by and own what you said, even if it was wrong. He used AI and got caught. And going forward, I’ll be treating Ars Technica as an unreliable AI-generated “news source”.
The whole purpose of a news reporter is kind of to get their news right.
If they can’t do that, their service is worthless.That’s the old way of doing news.
The new way of doing news is generating news that favors the news reporters’ financial backers.
I signed up to Ars 9 years ago. It is painful to transparently witness the decay.
Benj Edwards handles most of their AI coverage. I wouldn’t take his use of AI as a sign of what the rest of the staff is doing.
He did own it.
I disagree, clearly. Owning would be “yes, I messed up, I used AI to write my process and didn’t bother reviewing any of it, I took shortcuts”. That and just that. Using “I was feeling sick” is deflecting blame instead of owning it.
He’s saying he didn’t respond sooner because his bosses told him not to until they released a statement, then be got such which it’s why he didn’t respond sooner. We’re saying the same thing bub.
Utter bullshit. If you use AI at any point in generating the work product, that work product is AI-gemerated. Even if it’s a fecklessly lazy churnalist organising their notes.
So can someone ELI5 all this for me please
