Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:

1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.

2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.

3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.

I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.

That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.

As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.

The good news is that there are 3 senior editors (though none tasked with AI specifically), the bad news is that one of them was the coauthor. Their staff page does list two copy editors (variously labeled "copy editor" and "copyeditor" which is unfortunate) but no one assigned to fact checking specifically.

For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.

But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

and all the quotes are fake. The section:

> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.

> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”

> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”

> ...

> “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”

Source: the original Ars Technica article:

https://archive.md/8VPMw

There are lots of unintentional acts, simply because fully predicting all the consequences of ones actions is genuinely difficult. I agree that drunk driving is not one; those consequences are well-known.

Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.