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In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje....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?
qnleigh 24 minutes ago [-]
Yes I just read the retracted article and I can't find anything that I knew was false. What were the fabricated quotes?
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.
mzajc 43 minutes 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 29 minutes 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.
andrewflnr 55 minutes 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.
jemmyw 28 minutes ago [-]
That don't actually say it's a blame free post-mortem, nor is it worded as such. They do say it's their policy not to publish AI generated anything unless specifically labelled. So the assumption would be that someone didn't follow policy and there will be repercussions.
The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
anonymous908213 50 minutes ago [-]
Yes. This is being treated as thought it were a mistake, and oh, humans make mistakes! But it was no mistake. Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it. But plagiariasm and fabrication require malicious intent, and the authors responsible engaged in both.
blell 50 minutes ago [-]
There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
anonymous908213 49 minutes ago [-]
Outsourcing your job as a journalist to a chatbot that you know for a fact falsifies quotes (and everything else it generates) is absolutely intentional.
furyofantares 36 minutes ago [-]
It's intentionally reckless, not intentionally harmful or intentionally falsifying quotes. I am sure they would have preferred if it hadn't falsified any quotes.
blactuary 13 minutes ago [-]
He's on the AI beat, if he is unaware that a chatbot will fabricate quotes and didn't verify them that is a level of reckless incompetence that warrants firing
gdulli 12 minutes ago [-]
The tool when working as intended makes up quotes. Passing that off as journalism is either malicious or unacceptably incompetent.
kermatt 37 minutes ago [-]
Outsourcing writing to a bot without attribution may not be malicious, but it does strain integrity.
InsideOutSanta 23 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the article was written by an LLM; it doesn't read like it, it reads like it was written by actual people.
My assumption is that one of the authors used something like Perplexity to gather information about what happened. Since Shambaugh blocks AI company bots from accessing his blog, it did not get actual quotes from him, and instead hallucinated them.
They absolutely should have validated the quotes, but this isn't the same thing as just having an LLM write the whole article.
I also think this "apology" article sucks, I want to know specifically what happened and what they are doing to fix it.
roxolotl 38 minutes ago [-]
The issues with such tools are highly documented though. If you’re going to use a tool with known issues you’d better do your best to cover for them.
lapcat 33 minutes ago [-]
> Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
"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."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
andrewflnr 48 minutes ago [-]
They're expected by policy to not use AI. Lying about using AI is also malice.
furyofantares 40 minutes ago [-]
It's a reckless disregard for the readers and the subjects of the article. Still not malice though, which is about intent to harm.
andrewflnr 31 minutes ago [-]
Lying is intent to deceive. Deception is harm. This is not complicated.
maxbond 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
32 minutes ago [-]
skybrian 49 minutes 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 47 minutes 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 41 minutes 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 36 minutes 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.
maxbond 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
47 minutes ago [-]
29 minutes ago [-]
anonymous908213 1 hours 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 5 minutes 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 1 hours 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 1 hours 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.
unethical_ban 50 minutes ago [-]
Who got fired?
netsharc 42 minutes ago [-]
The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not..
It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
throw3e98 35 minutes ago [-]
This is a US holiday weekend and lots of people are going to be on weekend vacations. Check back on Wednesday.
g947o 28 minutes ago [-]
Then they should take their time publishing this statement.
Nobody is in a hurry.
usefulposter 2 hours 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.
malfist 1 hours 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.
misnome 46 minutes 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 33 minutes 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.
g947o 25 minutes ago [-]
They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.
maxbond 7 minutes ago [-]
No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility.
If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.
lapcat 28 minutes 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.
10 minutes ago [-]
add-sub-mul-div 58 minutes 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.
icegreentea2 1 hours 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 60 minutes 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 55 minutes 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 32 minutes 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.
Rendered at 20:16:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: 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?
Thread on Arstechnica forum: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/editor%E2%80%99s-note-...
The retracted article: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...
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?
The problem is people on the Internet, hn included, always howl for maximalist repercussions every time. ie someone should be fired. I don't see that as a healthy or proportionate response, I hope they just reinforce that policy and everyone keeps their jobs and learns a little.
My assumption is that one of the authors used something like Perplexity to gather information about what happened. Since Shambaugh blocks AI company bots from accessing his blog, it did not get actual quotes from him, and instead hallucinated them.
They absolutely should have validated the quotes, but this isn't the same thing as just having an LLM write the whole article.
I also think this "apology" article sucks, I want to know specifically what happened and what they are doing to fix it.
"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."
They aren't allowed to use the tool, so there was clearly intention.
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.
Assuming malice without investigating is itself careless.
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
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.
If they had named the people involved, the criticism would be, "they aren't taking responsibility, they're passing the buck to these employees."
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.
I think this track is unavoidable. I hate it.
It is definitely not a good look for a "Senior AI Reporter."
Nobody is in a hurry.
They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.
It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions.
Sounds optional.
If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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