| ▲ | Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations(arstechnica.com) |
| 74 points by bikenaga 2 hours ago | 57 comments |
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| ▲ | mrandish an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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 In the comments I found a link to the retracted article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje....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? |
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| ▲ | apparent 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In the case of hallucinated quotes, I think the more important aspect is to describe how this happened, whether the author is a regular contributor, how the editors missed it, and what steps are being taken to prevent it from happening in the future. It's good to issue a correction, and in this case to retract the article. But it doesn't really give me confidence going forward, especially where this was flagged because the misquoted person raised the issue. It's not like Ars' own processes somehow unearthed this error. It makes me think I should get in the habit of reading week-old Ars articles, whose errors would likely have been caught by early readers. | |
| ▲ | qnleigh an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes I just read the retracted article and I can't find anything that I knew was false. What were the fabricated quotes? | | |
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| ▲ | j0057 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Odd that there's no link to the retracted article. 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... |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | jemmyw an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There’s no malice if there was no intention of falsifying quotes. Using a flawed tool doesn’t count as intention. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | gdulli 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The tool when working as intended makes up quotes. Passing that off as journalism is either malicious or unacceptably incompetent. | |
| ▲ | kermatt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Outsourcing writing to a bot without attribution may not be malicious, but it does strain integrity. | | |
| ▲ | InsideOutSanta 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | roxolotl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They're expected by policy to not use AI. Lying about using AI is also malice. | | |
| ▲ | furyofantares an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Lying is intent to deceive. Deception is harm. This is not complicated. | | |
| ▲ | maxbond 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 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. By submitting this work they warranted that it was their own. Requiring an explicit false statement to qualify as a lie excludes many of the most harmful cases of deception. | | |
| ▲ | maxbond a minute ago | parent [-] | | Have you ever gone through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop? Was that dishonesty? |
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| ▲ | hibikir 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | We see a typical issue in modern online media: The policy is to not use AI, but he demands of content created per day makes it very difficult to not use AI... so the end result is undisclosed AI. This is all over the old blogosphere publications, regardless of who owns them. The ad revenue per article is just not great |
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| ▲ | skybrian an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | anonymous908213 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't believe there is any greater journalistic malpractice than fabrication. Sure, there are worse cases of such malpractice in the world given the low importance of the topic, but journalists should be reporting the truth on anything they deem important enough to write about. Cutting corners on the truth, of all things, is the greatest dereliction of their duty, and undermines trust in journalism altogether, which in turn undermines our collective society as we no longer work from a shared understanding of reality owing to our inability to trust people who report on it. I've observed that journalists tend to have unbelievably inflated egos and tout themselves as the fourth estate that upholds all of free society, and yet their behaviour does not actually comport with that and is rather actively detrimental in the modern era. I also do not believe this was a genuine result of incompetence. I entertained that it is possible, but that would be the most charitable view possible, and I don't think the benefit of doubt is earned in this case. They routinely cover LLM stories, the retracted article being about that very subject matter, so I have very little reason to believe they are ignorant about LLM hallucinations. If it were a politics journalist or something, I would be more inclined to give the ignorance defense credit, but as it is we have every reason to believe they know what LLMs are and still acted with intention, completely disregarding the duty they owe to to their readers to report facts. |
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| ▲ | sevg 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mzajc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | g947o an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jmward01 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | esseph an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | anonymous908213 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | maxbond 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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." |
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| ▲ | unethical_ban an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Who got fired? |
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| ▲ | netsharc an hour ago | parent [-] | | The bylines are known, check in 4-5 months whether either or both names still appear on new articles or not.. | | |
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| ▲ | usefulposter 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | malfist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | icegreentea2 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf". If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that | | |
| ▲ | maxbond 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else. What would you have liked to see them announce? |
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| ▲ | lapcat an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | icegreentea2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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