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Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

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Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#351

Post by chrisjj »

dust-jacket wrote: post #310
AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

I absolutely disagree. This has been done very professionally. They pulled the article. They handled the personnel matter. They didn't try to pretend it hasn't happened. Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something. They literally replaced the whole text with a note from the editor saying "this article was bad".

> Why are people here acting like retracting an article is an attempt to hide something.

Because the retraction notice hid the article name and the author name?

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#352

Post by greedo »

Aurornis wrote: post #314
iepathos wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Ars Technica editorial process requires assuming reporters don't fabricate quotes, then their process is inadequate. That's like a software company letting junior engineers release directly to production with just a spellcheck and no real process to catch errors. Major publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, etc. have a dedicated fact-checking department that is part of the process and needs to give th…

> That's like a software company letting junior engineers release directly to production This person wasn’t a junior. Editorial processes don’t actually check every single line of everything that is written. Journalists are trusted to report accurately. This person demonstrated they could not be trusted. > Why wasn't there any fact checking? Why do programmers ever let any bugs get to production if they have code rev…

But they generally (or at least they did when I was in the biz) fact check quotes. It only takes a few minutes to fire off an email.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#353

Post by jrmg »

bayindirh wrote: post #123
jrmg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it normal/expected for a news organization to publish that they fired someone? I’m inclined to take the ‘don’t comment on personnel matters’ at face value. They did report on the article quote sourcing debacle at the time - perhaps not as quickly as some would’ve liked, but within a couple of days.

Yes. Normally, and Ars is generally up to that standard, the editorial staff (or Editor in Chief) updates the article, adds a note about the correction, and further adds that the original author of the article is not working with Ars anymore. It stays as a mark, immortalizing the error, but it's a better scar than deleting and acting like it never happened. I also want to note that, this last incident response is not…

There was nothing at the article’s URL for a day or so after it was pulled (on a holiday weekend, FWIW), which I agree isn’t great. But there is, now, a page up at the article’s original URL:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...

with a locked comment leading to the Editor’s statement:

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

I disagree with the idea that the misleading article text should remain up after a retraction.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#354

Post by yesterdayjones »

These comments are full of people who are not and have never been journalists talking about editorial processes they don't understand. I was a journalist before AI (and have since pivoted to software development), so I feel the need to correct a mistaken assumption.

1. An editor's role is not to make sure all quotes are accurate to what the source spoke or wrote. They are not babysitters. It's a higher-level position that is supposed to ensure that the article makes sense; that the sources are sufficient in number and are credible; that the story covers the assigned topic, etc. Your job as an editor is _not_ to babysit your reporters. Reporters are given a large degree of freedom and are expected to have sufficient education/training and ethical grounding* to do their jobs independently. What seems to have happened here is a lapse in judgement while the reporter was sick and on a deadline. Pressure's a bitch.

2. This is certainly more of an opinion, but AI tools have zero place in any profession that relies on information integrity (law, journalism). The reporter shouldn't have used it, and the editors and editorial processes are not at fault, especially when Ars already forbids AI-generated content.

* I'm aware people think reporters are liars with agendas. You don't need to say it.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#355

Post by pavon »

bayindirh wrote: post #137
nerdsniper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this last incident response is not typical of the Ars I'm used to. They never really announced Peter Bright leaving ArsTechnica either though. At least not until much much later.

That was a criminal case, though. The court process may have prevented them from talking about it to keep things fair. I'm not a US citizen and IANAL, so YMMV.

It isn't just Dr Pizza. In recent history (perhaps since being bought by Conde Nast?), when staff left, stories from them simply stopped appearing, and questions about whether they had left or were on a break were met with crickets. The only conformation came when the bio was changed and/or they announced they were hiring or had hired the person replacing them.

At least that is what I remember with Sam Machkovech, Ron Amadeo, Cyrus Farivar, Joe Mullin, Andrew Cunningham, Casey Johnston, Jaqui Cheng. And the policy doesn't appear to be limited to people leaving on bad terms since Andrew has since returned, and Cyrus occasionally contributes freelance articles. The last time I remember them announcing a departing staff member is when Ben Kuchera left.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#356

Post by tw85 »

AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

I wonder if it has something to do with an incident years ago in which one of Ars' senior reporters (Peter Bright) was arrested and convicted for child enticement. Ars eventually allowed one of their readers to write a forum article about it, but they didn't write one themselves at the time. Some people defended this course of non-action by saying it was the sensible thing to do because his colleagues could become witnesses in the trial.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#357

Post by pavon »

g947o wrote: post #267
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complications of HR policy and law do not allow for your proposed solution.

I have no experience in that area, but it's hard to see how a plain, factual statement "This person is no longer with the company." can be problematic.

That statement by itself wouldn't warrant an article, and it would be difficult to include a statement like that in a larger article about the event, without implying more than that.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#358

Post by bsimpson »

guerython wrote: post #288

[flagged]

I recently saw an interview with Anders Hejlsberg of TypeScript (and a long pedigree before that). The interviewer asked him about the role of AI in his work. I believe the context was porting TypeScript's tooling to Go.

His trick is to use AI to build the tools that do the work, not to ask it to do the work itself. If you say "hey Mr. AI, please port this code to Go," it'll give you back a big bag of code that you have no insight into. If it hallucinated something, you wouldn't know without auditing the whole massive codebase.

If instead you let AI build a small tool to aid the work, your audit surface is much smaller - you just need to make sure the helper tool is correct. It can then operate deterministically over the much larger codebase.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#359

Post by tw85 »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #104
AnonC wrote: post #50

Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies. In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn t…

They’re at this level because the editors have always had low standers. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like 50% of Ars headlines are completely misleading. They’ve had this problem for years. They will publish anything that gets them clicks. They do not care if a writer makes things up. They do not care if their headlines are misleading - in fact, that’s the point. They clearly got into the job in order to i…

It doesn't help that the background of most Ars' writers was some variant of "former IT pro", which is almost guaranteed to mean they're unqualified to write with nuance and depth about serious technical topics. So you have guys like Jon Brodkin pumping out total nonsense about the latest wireless communications breakthroughs (just one example I remember) while 99% of the audience has no clue and won't check them on it.

Re: Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

#360

Post by mikkupikku »

lukan wrote: post #341
mikkupikku wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little thing called reading. I read Are comments, I read reddit comments, and I judge them to both be a bunch of morons who are perpetually suspicious of nuance.

You did not seem to got my point, that there are readers, but not all of them are commentors? So judging all readers because you perceive commentors as mainly stupid is maybe missing data?

You're right, I used the word readers when I was talking about the commenters. My apologies to Ars readers who don't comment, including myself.
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