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 influence and manipulate people.

They’re bad people, with terrible motivations, and unchecked power. They only walk back when something really really bad happens.

Never trust an Ars headline.

Where I work in healthcare honestly and owning up is encouraged and unless there is major negligence not often punished. They just want to try learn why the mistake happened and look for ways to prevent it going forward. My buddy said for his company if an accident happens WorkSafe is not out to punish as long as they are very forward and honest. Again they want to learn how to avoid it happening again. Punishment only scares others to try hide mistakes.

I think they missed a big opportunity to instead of firing the guy sit him down and stress how not okay this was and that it harms the credibility and he needs to understand that and make a proper apology. They could make him do some education like ethical reporting responsibilities or whatever.

Then like you say not just hide the article but point out the mistakes and corrections. Describe the mistake and how credible reporting is their priority and the author will be given further education to avoid this happening again. They could also make new policies like going forward all articles that use AI for search results must attempt to find a source for that information. This would build trust not harm it in my opinion.

It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.

I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.

This has just happened - i'm giving Ars a bit more time to come out with a piece examining the situation. They're a pretty good operation, I think. but it they don't...

you're participating in a social media site where something like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do something and write this article about it." So put your money where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.

Sometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know how to say no.

You're an account created after LLms were public ally available and don't have any readily available links to public accounts that verify your identity.

I am assuming that this comment is about as accurate as what got the journalist in question fired, for the same reasons.

The problem is accountability. If your name is on the article, this is your work. If you publish an article with fabricated quotes, it’s your fault regardless of if an AI tool was used or not since you hit the button at the end to sign off on it.

Thanks! and indeed - here's the sequence (in the usual reverse order). If there are missing threads we can add them...

OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments)

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (82 comments)

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (624 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (951 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)

> I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years.

It says things I know to be false fairly regularly. I don't keep a log or anything, but it's left an impression that it's far from reliable.

It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles

I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.

Try searching for something niche. You'll get a confidently wrong and often condescending answer.

> I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links.

You would know how?

The links contradict or do not support the overviews often in my experience.

Well, I hope you take this story as a caution that you shouldn't do that in any way that can seriously compromise your career/health/finances.

You should be checking the links more often, IMO. I've seen it respond a number of times with content that is not supported by the citations.

While trying to find an example by going back through my history though, the search "linux shebang argument splitting" comes back from the AI with:

> On Linux and most Unix-like systems, the shebang line (e.g., #!/bin/bash ...) does not perform argument splitting by default. The entire string after the interpreter path is passed as a single argument to the interpreter.

(that's correct) …followed by:

> To pass multiple arguments portably on modern systems, the env command with the -S (split string) option is the standard solution.

(`env -S` isn't portable. IDK if a subset of it is portable, or not. I tend to avoid it, as it is just too complex, but let's call "is portable" opinion.)

(edited out a bit about the splitting on Linux; I think I had a different output earlier saying it would split the args into "-S" and "the rest", but this one was fine.)

> Note: The -S option is a modern extension and may not be available

But this, … which is it.

It is scary but also exciting. As long as there are humans making informed decisions, there will be demand for quality sources of information. But to keep up with AI, content sites will need to raise their standards. Less intrusive ads, less superficial stuff, more in-depth articles with complex yet easily navigable structure, with layers of citations, diagrams, data, and impeccable accuracy. News articles with the technical depth of today's dissertations.

I know people love to hate on the AI overviews, and I'm a person who generally hates both google and AI. But--I see them as basically good and ideal. After all most of the time I am googling something like trivial, like a simple fact. And for the last decade when I have to click into sites for the information it's some SEO spam-ridden garbage site. So I am very glad to not have to interact with those anymore.

Of course Google gets little credit for this since it was their own malfeasance that led to all the SEO spam anyway (and the horrible expertsexchange-quality tech information, and stupid recipe sites that put life stories first)... but at least there now there is a backpressure against some of the spammy crap.

I am also convinced that the people here reporting that the overviews are always wrong are... basically lying? Or more likely applying some serious negative bias to the pattern they're reporting. The overviews are wrong sometimes, yes, but surely it is like 10% of the time, not always. Probably they're biased because they're generally mad at google, or AI being shoved in their face in general, and I get that... but you don't make the case against google/AI stronger by misrepresenting it; it is a stronger argument if it's accurate and resonates with everyones' experiences.

I have seen it be utterly wrong so many times recently I'm considering permanently hiding it. For instance, googling for "Amiga twin stick games" it listed a number of old, top-down, very much single axis games like Alien Breed as examples.

It will cycle.

Without the content site the AI overview will become useless

Uh, really? In my experience, at least a quarter of the info it gives me is usually manufactured or incorrect in some critical way.

In fact, if you switch to "Pro" mode, it frequently says the complete opposite of what it claimed in "Fast" mode while still being ~10-20% wrong. (Not to say it's not useful — there's no better way to aggregate and synthesize obscure information — but it should definitely not be relied on a source of anything other than links for detailed followup.)

Neither side has issued a statement about what happened, but Benj’s Bluesky post does not read like a post of someone who would have resigned due to this.

> That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that are among the best in their fields

I miss Maggie Koerth & Jon Stokes

"I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published."

Nothing suspicious about heavy use of qualifiers in a non-apology blanket denial. Where's the Polymarket for whether this guy has a job next month?

https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...

In defense of that, his writing style was basically the same long before LLMs.

Sad if true. I used to really enjoy reading his freelance articles in various publications pre-AI.

He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting. But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander isn't just a synonym of "lie".

No, the journalist came in and slandered the LLM Twice and Jim Fell.

4 times, you forgot the owner of the bot that did the PR.

I think that's the nail in the coffin. Most others could say it was a giant whoopsie, but here it goes to the heart of their credibility. How could they continue write authoritatively about AI, having done this.

I dunno. If AI doesn't write your articles, are you even an AI reporter?

Sorry, I never could resist a good dad joke

The core story is literally about how AI made up facts. The solution is more of the same?

>I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business.

NFT protocol doesnt really care what the payload is. NFT purveyors likewise dont care what their payload is, as long as they could use the term "NFT".

NFT's are great for certain use cases (Crypto Kitties is still around I believe) but there was never a single moment I considered that owning a weird ape jpeg, even if it was somehow, properly owned by me, would be worth millions of dollars or whatever. Its like trying to sell a "TCP".

That said, future blockchain applications will probably still rely on NFT's in some fashion. Just not the protocol as product weirdness we got for a few years there.

I've never seen anyone here claim that AI never hallucinates or can provide incorrect information.

I've not heard many people claim that LLMs don't hallucinate, however I have seen people (that I previously believed to be smart):

1. Believe LLMs outright even knowing they are frequently wrong

2. Claim that LLMs making shit up is caused by the user not prompting it correctly. I suppose in the same way that C is memory safe and only bad programmers make it not so.

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? I just had to ask you this in a different context.

You may not owe your least favorite publications better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you elaborate? Perhaps I haven't noticed that they push pro-sponsored content (what does this mean, exactly?). I do find their comment section to be pretty lousy, and very partisan. But the tech coverage always seemed fair enough. What am I missing?

He was supposed to be their "Senior AI Reporter." Him including basically anything from LLMs, without verifying it, in articles not only demonstrates a complete lack of credibility as a writer, but also a complete lack of understanding of AI. Even if they might have personally wanted to keep him on, you just can't after something like this.

What is the connection between these two statements? Are we supposed to presume that someone who apologizes on Bluesky should never be fired? Or did you also read the article and thought this was important information?

The raison d’etre for the journalist, in AD 2026, is less to gather information than to verify it. The journalist who cannot be trusted is no journalist at all. He is a blogger.

Why would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?

"Apologized on Blue Sky" is absolutely no reason to keep them. The author did the absolutely worst things a journalist can do (short of actual corruption) and is unfit for the job:

- He didn't care for his story,

- he didn't care to verify his story,

- he published bullshit made up stuff,

- and put words in a real person's mouth

- and he didn't even care to write the thing himself

Why keep him and pay him? What mentality all the above show? What respect, both self respect and respect for the job?

If they wanted stories from an LLM, they can pay for a subscription to one directly.

Hope this sends a message to journalist hacks who offload their writing or research to an LLM.

Can you name any other way for Ars Technica to handle this situation without permanently soiling their reputation?

That absolutely should be career-ending for a journalist, apology or no