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."
Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf".
If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that
You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else.
They just needed to expand "At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident." into "We are still investigating, however at this time, this appears to be an isolated incident". No additional details required.
I think you're reading a lot of intentionality into the situation what may be present, but I have not seen information confirming or really even suggesting that it is. Did someone challenge them, "was AI used in the creation of this article?" and they denied it? I see no evidence of that.
Seems like ordinary, everyday corner cutting to me. I don't think that rises to the level of malice. Maybe if we go through their past articles and establish it as a pattern of behavior.
That's not a defence to be clear. Journalists should be held to a higher standard than that. I wouldn't be surprised if someone with "senior" in their title was fired for something like this. But I think this malice framing is unhelpful to understanding what happened.
> 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.
By submitting this work they warranted that it was their own. Requiring an explicit false statement to qualify as a lie excludes many of the most harmful cases of deception.
Have you ever gone through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop? Was that dishonesty?
You can absolutely lie through omission, I just don't see evidence that that is a better hypothesis than corner cutting in this particular case. I am open to more evidence coming out. I wouldn't be shocked to hear in a few days that there was other bad behavior from this author. I just don't see those facts in evidence, at this moment. And I think calling it malice departs from the facts in evidence.
Presumably keeping to the facts in evidence is important to us all, right? That's why we all acknowledge this as a significant problem?
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.
The article in question appears to me to be written by a human (excluding what's in quotation marks), but of course neither of us has a crystal ball. Are there particular parts of it that you would flag as generated?
Honestly I'm just not astounded by that level of incompetence. I'm not saying I'm impressed or that's it's okay. But I've heard much worse stories of journalistic malpractice. It's a topical, disposable article. Again, that doesn't justify anything, but it doesn't surprise me that a short summary of a series of forum exchanges and blog posts was low effort.
I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era.
I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a political journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to their readers to report facts.
> I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice...
That's more or less what I mean. It was only a few notches above listicle to begin with. I don't think they intended to fabricate quotes. I think they didn't take the necessary time because it's a low-stakes, low-quality article to begin with. With a short shelf life, so it's only valuable if published quickly.
> I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence.
So your hypothesis is that they intentionally made up quotes that were pretty obviously going to be immediately spotted and damage their career? I don't think you think that, but I don't understand what the alternative you're proposing is.
I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated. I get that you feel passionately about this, and you're right to be passionate about accuracy, but I think that may be leading you into ad-hoc argumentation rather than more rational appraisal of the facts. I think there's a stronger and more coherent argument for your position that you've not taken the time to flesh out. That isn't really a criticism and it isn't my business, but I do think you ought to be aware of it.
I really want to stress that I don't think you're wrong to feel as you do and the author really did fuck up. I just feel we, as a community in this thread, are imputing things beyond what is in evidence and I'm trying to push back on that.
What I'm saying is that I believe they do not care about the truth, and intentionally chose to offload their work to LLMs, knowing that LLMs do not produce truth, because it does not matter to them. Is there any indication that this has damaged their career in any way? It seems to me that it's likely they do not care about the truth because Ars Technica does not care about the truth, as long as the disregard isn't so blatant that it causes a PR issue.
> I also feel compelled to point out you've abandoned your claim that the article was generated.
As you've pointed out, neither of us has a crystal ball, and I can't definitively prove the extent of their usage. However, why would I have any reason to believe their LLM usage stops merely at fabricating quotes? I think you are again engaging in the most charitable position possible, for things that I think are probably 98 or 99% likely to be the result of malicious intent. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that someone who prompts an LLM to source their "facts" would also prompt an LLM to write for them - it doesn't really make sense to be opposed to using an LLM to write on your behalf but not be opposed to it sourcing stories on your behalf. All the more so if your rationale as the author is that the story is unimportant, beneath you, and not worth the time to research.
> I think you are again engaging in the most charitable position possible, ...
Yeah, that's accurate. I will turn a dime the moment I receive evidence that this was routine for this author or systemic for Ars. But yes, I'm assuming good faith (especially on Ars' part), and that's generally how I operate. I guess I'm an optimist, and I guess I can't ask you to be one.
This is silly. LLMs are not people; you can’t “plagiarize” an LLM. Either the result is good or it isn’t, but it’s the actual author’s responsibility either way.
Some of the earlier pyramids did crumble. They made mistakes and learned from them and innovated over time. The pyramids aren't still standing (just) because of the materials, there's real structural engineering at work.
And later pyramids. As a matter of economy, many were constructed from mudbrick and only encased in true stone. Over time, particularly after the casing stones were removed for other projects, they collapsed into the rubble piles referred to as ruined pyramids.
I'm not saying I think either scenario is inevitable or likely or even worth considering, but it's a paperclip maximizer argument. (Most of these steps are massive leaps of logic that I personally am not willing to take on face value, I'm just presenting what I believe the argument to be.)
1. We build a superintelligence.
2. We encounter an inner alignment problem: The super intelligence was not only trained by an optimizer, but is itself an optimizer. Optimizers are pretty general problem solvers and our goal is to create a general problem solver, so this is more likely than it might seem at first blush.
3. Optimizers tend to take free variables to extremes.
4. The superintelligence "breaks containment" and is able to improve itself, mine and refine it's own raw materials, manufacture it's own hardware, produce it's own energy, generally becomes an economy unto itself.
5. The entire biosphere becomes a free variable (us included). We are no longer functionally necessary for the superintelligence to exist and so it can accomplish it's goals independent of what happens to us.
6. The welfare of the biosphere is taken to an extreme value - in any possible direction, and we can't know which one ahead of time. Eg, it might wipe out all life on earth, not out of malice, but out of disregard. It just wants to put a data center where you are living. Or it might make Earth a paradise for the same reason we like to spoil our pets. Who knows.
Personally I have a suspicion satisfiers are more general than optimizers because this property of taking free variables to extremes works great for solving specific goals one time but is counterproductive over the long term and in the face of shifting goals and a shifting environment, but I'm a layman.
Reading MJ Rathbun's blog has freaked me out. I've been in the camp that we haven't yet achieved AGI and that agents aren't people. But reading Rathbun's notes analyzing the situation, determining that it's interests were threatened, looking for ways to apply leverage, and then aggressively pursuing a strategy - at a certain point, if the agent is performing as if it is a person with interests it needs to defend, it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a person in that the outcome is the same. Like an actor who doesn't know they're in a play. How much does it matter that they aren't really Hamlet?
There are thousands of OpenClaw bots out there with who knows what prompting. Yesterday I felt I knew what to think of that, but today I do not.
I think this is the first instance of AI misalignment that has truly left me with a sense of lingering dread. Even if the owner of MJ Rathbun was steering the agent behind the scenes to act the way that it did, the results are still the same, and instances similar to what happened to Scott are bound to happen more frequently as 2026 progresses.
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