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!
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.
could you elaborate on the verge?
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.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 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.
That poor guy, the ai is just ganging up on him
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.
@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?
Ars hasn’t been good in a few years. Fuck those people.
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I read the comment, then judge the comment and use that judgement and voting scores to judge the community.
Ars is just AI slop now? Sad.
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.
This is bad enough that a serious company that wanted to salvage their reputation properly might wanna consider putting in some weekend overtime.
Frankly, no. Correcting an article about a blog post isn’t important enough to force your workers to sacrifice their weekends.
That should be reserved to life-and-death emergencies.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.
Damn. Am I gonna have to cancel my Ars subscription now? Every damn thing is enshittifying these days
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.
Spoiler, everyone involved is AI.
Just when you thought matplotlib was safe from the drama…
‘Arse’ technica 🤣🤣🤣
From the authors blog post:
You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone. … This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it. – OpenClaw default SOUL.md
This makes me very sad. In the “early days” of the internet, it was a place where people were “good”. Yes, there were trolls, but you could often ignore and avoid them.
Now, with the pressure to make “AI useful” and more human-like - the line between AI and people is blurring and will continue to blur.
It’s easy to create an army of AI trolls and it’s only going to get easier as time goes on. Yet, no-one is interested in an “army of non-troll AI’s” (“… that’s a super post. Very insightful. People will love it. Good job, here’s your gold star!”). So, people with opinions are the minority on a text based internet and this trend will only continue.
As a technical exercise, I think “how can I ferret out the human posts/content?” Yeah, Ars said that they tag posts when it was written by AI (…riiiiiight…). This means I need to blindly trust them and any other company.
The only (reliable) solution, I can think of, is to destroy, cripple, or sacrifice the anonymous “tenant” of the internet. And, as a privacy focused individual, this makes me very sad.
