I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.

When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?

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.