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ArsTechnica's response to the AI generated "quotations"
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Technology
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It sounds like they will be reminding their team not to do that and scrutinizing articles in the near future
Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you're paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.
Calm down, that’s not what happened
@GammaGames this.
The editors are ultimately responsible for this, and they are owning up, @artyom. This is how it should be. There will probably be internal consequences to whoever wrote the piece and included the slop-quotes, but the buck stops with the editors as far as anyone outside is concerned.
Otherwise editors could just blame every slip-up and failure on the intern (whoever the intern is that week) and publicly fire them, having a nice public execution instead of real accountability.
He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right... but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this. Now, arguably he should have taken sick time off instead of trying to work through it (as he admits), but this would have cost him vacation time, and the fact that he even was forced into making this choice is a systemic problem that is not being sufficiently acknowledged.
After all these years my poor European brain is still struggling to understand this.
It helps if you think of America as believing that when an individual gets sick it is their own fault.
If only this could have been prevented by, I don't know, not experimenting.
It is literally his job to be familiar with this technology, which he cannot do if he does not experiment with it.
Having said that, doing this experiment while sick was probably ill-advised, so in that sense I agree with you, but in fairness he probably was not thinking clearly while he was sick.
I see what you did there.
Surely he picked the very worst thing to experiment with, and at the worst time... And that's the very best case scenario
Yes... hence the "ill-advised" part.
I've had COVID before, it sucks but it doesn't make you stupid.
I don't believe him.
Why don't you believe him?
Because it's completely ridiculous. What if we was just phoning it in? He's just going to come out and say it?
So in other words, you are just making an assumption.
I mean, I find it hard to believe too.
Is quite the umm…. Accident? So the ars writer pulled some junk from ChatGPT, and used it as a direct quote in the article by accident? I suppose maybe depends on how the ars writer takes notes, and maybe should be an opportunity for reflection on how they do that to not have this happen again. Especially since it sounds likely they do ai investigation as part of their main job.
I mean, the Covid piece is certainly interesting, and sounds like a failure of ars to offer real sick time or a backup writer or something. I’m not sure.
All around, a big mess. Though, the blog in question was a fascinating read.
I do not see it as being so implausible that he got mixed up due to being sick and thought he was doing one thing while he was actually doing another; as you said, among other things, he should probably reflect on how he takes notes.
I think that my overall point stands that there is not a good reason not to at least tentatively give him the benefit of the doubt that he screwed up in the way that he said that he screwed up, rather than assuming that he is lying and actually did something significantly worse, especially given that he fully admits to having screwed up and took full responsibility for it.
In other wrong words, yes. An assumption is not the same thing as a belief.
I know the internet is full of untrustworthy charlatans, so I can't blame you, but I'm as anti-AI as they come and I do believe him. Mistakes happen, especially in the context of rushed work done while sick. Remember that a lie by a grifter and the truth from an innocent sometimes look exactly the same; effective lies are made off of what was once a truth, after all.
There are plenty of people who are already piling on him. Is it really so bad that some of us feel the need to counter some of what is being said?
We’re also on beehaw, that reply is way out of line
So you're calling for someone to be fired without actually reading the article or understanding the situation? What punishment do you deserve for your laziness?
I did read the article. What punishment do you deserve for assuming I did not?
You're a very gullible person if you believe his multiple excuses. Would you happen to be interested in a new revolutionary cryptocurrency? Its gonna go to the moon! Promise!
Gullible for believing that sick people are fallible? Okay.