161–170 of 223 posts
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Yeah! We can call things reckless incompetence without calling them malice!
The state of California can classify some driving under the influence cases as operating with "implied malice". Not sure it would qualify in this scenario, but there is precedent for arguing that reckless incompetence is malicious when it is done without regard for the consequences.
Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess. [0] https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p [1] your mileage may vary on how much you believe it and how much slack you want to cut him if you do
The bigger problem is that he felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever. Makes me wonder about Ars Technica's company culture.
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Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.
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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.
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.
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There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention.
Replace parent-poster's "malice" with "malfeasance", and it works well-enough. I may not intend to burn someone's house down by doing horribly reckless things with fireworks... but after it happens, surely I would still bear both some fault and some responsibility.
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> felt the need to work while ill in bed, with very little sleep and sick with fever You are assuming that... He says he currently has a fever. But was he sick when he wrote the article? That is not so clear.
He was, it's in the first paragraph > I have been sick with COVID all week /../, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.
Feels like nail in the coffin, Ars has already been going downhill for half a decade or more. I unsubscribed (just the free rss) regardless of their retraction.
Unsubscribing from the free RSS feed. If you weren't paying or consuming ads, I'm not sure how much your vote should count.
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Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.
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 n…
So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.
> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.
Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).
Is it an American thing to work even when you are sick?
So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.
(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)