FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

301 points by bikenaga

by ilamont

7 subcomments

Former technology journalist here.
If you want to experiment with reported news using untested tools that have known quality problems, do it in a strictly controlled environment where the output can be carefully vetted. Senior editor(s) need to be in the loop. Start with something easier, not controversial or high-profile articles.
One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.

by water-data-dude

5 subcomments

Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
[1] your mileage may vary on how much you believe it and how much slack you want to cut him if you do

by dang

0 subcomment

Recent and related (in reverse order):
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (602 comments)
AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (28 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 (945 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 (746 comments)

by vor_

2 subcomments

Several of the subscribers in the comments are so eager to praise Ars for "catching" the error and being honest by retracting the article, as if that's not an expected journalistic standard. They're so happy to have a reason NOT to be upset. This wasn't even caught by Ars or any of its readers. The guy being misquoted had to sign up and post a comment about it.

by mzajc

2 subcomments

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?

by icegreentea2

4 subcomments

Bluesky post by Benj (one of the authors of the article). https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
He admits to using an AI tool, says he was sick and did dumb things. He does clear Kyle (the other author).

by j0057

4 subcomments

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...

by ChocMontePy

0 subcomment

For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.
But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
and all the quotes are fake. The section:
> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.
> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”
> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”
> ...
> “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”
Source: the original Ars Technica article:
https://archive.md/8VPMw

by hysan

0 subcomment

While I commend Ars and the author for taking responsibility, I am a bit off put by the wording used for the retraction on the original article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...
> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.
Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.

by andrewflnr

8 subcomments

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.

by petterroea

1 subcomments

> That this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy.
Ars were caught with their pants down. We have no reason to believe otherwise. It isn't possible to prove otherwise. We as readers are lucky ars quoted someone who disabled LLM access to their website, causing the hallucination and giving us a smoking gun.
Clawing back credibility will be hard

by lich_king

0 subcomment

> 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.
Both from the Mastodon post of the journalist (which admits to casual use of more than one LLM), and from a cursory review of this author's past articles, I'm willing to bet that this rule wasn't followed more than once.

by Rapzid

0 subcomment

Fabricated quotes has been a huge problem outside the new AI issues for years(decades?). The vast majority of print "news" people consume is cynically designed "outrage porn" targeted towards different segment's political proclivities; aka "opinion" and "analysis" pieces. Both sides for maximum clicks!
They put quote-looking not-quotes in the headlines and articles routinely that essentially amount to "putting words in someone's mouth". A very large portion of the population seems to take this at face value as direct quotes, or accurate paraphrasing, when they absolutely are not.

by sevg

1 subcomments

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.

by mrandish

3 subcomments

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?
Edit to add more info: I hadn't yet read the now-retracted original article on achive.org. Now that I have I think this may be much more interesting than just another case of "lazy reporter uses LLM to write article". Scott, the person originally misquoted, also suspects something stranger is going on.
> "This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed." https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...
My theory is a bit different than Scott's: Ars appears to use an automated tool which adds text links to articles to increase traffic to any related articles already on Ars. If that tool is now LLM-based to allow auto-generating links based on concepts instead of just keywords, perhaps it mistakenly has unconstrained access to changing other article text! If so, it's possible the author and even the editors may not be at fault. The blame could be on the Ars publishers using LLMs to automate monetization processes downstream of editorial. Which might explain the non-standard vague retraction. If so, that would make for an even more newsworthy article that's directly within Ars' editorial focus.

by laurex

2 subcomments

Remember the old days when journalists would be excommunicated for plagarism and/or making things up? Some of those folks must be like "I was just too early..."

by TomMasz

0 subcomment

Isn't this the sort of thing editors are supposed to catch before publication? It's good that they retracted the article and apologized to the person who was falsely quoted, but it still managed to appear before someone caught it.

by mskogly

0 subcomment

The original piece was signed by BENJ EDWARDS AND KYLE ORLAND
I find it odd that Ars sees a need to protect such sloppy work.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Previously:
Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer; pulls story
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059

by add-sub-mul-div

1 subcomments

> 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.

by dmitrygr

2 subcomments

This is something you don’t see a lot in journalism nowadays. Multiple publications have been caught in multiple provable lies or inaccuracies over the last few years, and this is the first official retraction I’ve seen. I tip my hat to the ars team.

by delichon

3 subcomments

Imagine a future news environment where oodles of different models are applied to fact check most stories from most major sources. The markup from each one is aggregated and viewable.
A lot of the results would be predictable partisan takes and add no value. But in a case like this where the whole conversation is public, the inclusion of fabricated quotes would become evident. Certain classes of errors would become lucid.
Ars Technica blames an over reliance on AI tools and that is obviously true. But there is a potential for this epistemic regression to be an early stage of spiral development, before we learn to leverage AI tools routinely to inspect every published assertion. And then use those results to surface false and controversial ones for human attention.

0 subcomment

by QuadrupleA

1 subcomments

Glib observation, but this sounds quite generic and AI-written.

0 subcomment

by singpolyma3

0 subcomment

Did you fire the writer? No? Then what.

by anonymous908213

1 subcomments

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.

by unethical_ban

2 subcomments

Who got fired?

by iamtedd

0 subcomment

Kinda disappointing that the post that first reported the Ars Technica article and retraction got ~50% more comments than this one at about the same age. Seems people just love to outrage and complain than wait for the promised post-mortem, which if anything, came early.
Ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20260214134656/https://news.ycom...

by jmward01

2 subcomments

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.

by knowitnone3

0 subcomment

[dead]

by usefulposter

2 subcomments

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.