I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
Super disappointing for Arstechnica here.
Like, how does that even happen?
Like, how does that even happen?
Poorly designed journalism-bot it sounds like. Ethics of not writing this yourself aside, it should be trivial to check that whatever is in quotes is at least a substring in the source text. If the LLM is the top layer, and any research it does is a tool call that is purely at its discretion, it’s going to end up failing silently like this.
Update for those who care: They are promising an article about this but all evidence points to them desperately memory holing this incident.
Meanwhile, the quality of articles on Fridays especially has never been lower.
Tbf, they did also fire the author
Decision’s been made for me – Cancelled Ars Pro subscription renewal.
Isn’t “theshamblog” AI generated? So in this case, including the Ars article it’s referencing?
The pieces are dated 2024.
Isn’t this comment ai generated? It makes absolutely no sense lol
The date on this blog post:
13 February 2026
What makes you think the blog is AI generated? Even if it was (which I don’t think it is) the Arstechnica article ‘quoted’ quotes that weren’t there in the first place, so it would still be problematic on their end.
Also, where are you seeing that it’s dated 2024? For example, the linked post shows as published on February 13th 2026 for me.
I’m confused and I’m wondering if maybe we’re looking at two different things, haha. Is anyone else seeing what this person is seeing? I wonder what’s up
