This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is bad enough that a serious company that wanted to salvage their reputation properly might wanna consider putting in some weekend overtime.
Frankly, no. Correcting an article about a blog post isn't important enough to force your workers to sacrifice their weekends.
That should be reserved to life-and-death emergencies.
I pointed out a month ago that Ars Technica is a rot site and starting to be filled with AI regurgitated bullshit and got 80+ down votes and a few uneducated replies.
Y'all feel better now?
No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an "internet rot site" is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.
You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?
You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.
It's one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an "internet rot site."
It’s been going downhill for some time. I think the Condé Nast investment pretty much killed it. The last unnecessary site redesign that didn’t work correctly and made things unreadable was the last straw for me. I took it out of my rotation of “daily reads” and haven’t missed it.
@sartalon @technology Yeah, I have a lot more trust in the reputation that Ars has built over a decade of solid reliable tech journalism than I do in a random matplotlib maintainer - I’ve interacted with maintainers before. They’re not wrong about agents, but not sure how that’s any different from any human doing the same.
Ars has been around since the mid 1990s. Granted the sale to Conde Nast changed them slowly over time, as well as broadening the focus significantly, but it was likely a case of grow or die since the PC nerd market isn't anywhere near what it used to be.
In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/
I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or Dan using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.
What do they have to investigate? Did one of them accidentally get an AI to write the article and then accidentally post the article, like they just fell on the keyboard and accidentally typed in a prompt? Come on.
Benj was an author: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/
Though in the Ars response they say "Scott's post", so I'm confused.
Scott is the human subject of the article, who was misquoted by Ars and maligned by the slopbot.
Honestly, this whole thing surprises me. I have a lot of respect for Ars Technica. I hope they clean this up and prevent further issues in the future.
Benj and Kyle were the authors of the article; Dan's name wasn't on it.
They know how and why it happened, they are taking the weekend to investigate how to best take their foot from their mouths without eating too much shit
I'm betting it's definitely Ben since he is pretty pro-AI
BenJ had coauthor credit on it.
Now somebody needs to post about this on Reddit, so The Verge can make an AI generated piece based on the post!
🎶It's the ciiiiiiircle of slooooooooop🎶
And charge you to read it. The Verge is mostly (all?) paywalled these days.
I'd say they used to be good, but then I'd be lying. I still remember when The Verge shit all over the Galaxy Note, then praised the iPhone 6 Plus to high heaven. Even as an Apple guy, the bias stunk.
I'm always surprised online journals still ask for subscriptions with a straight face for the quality they put out. Someone making shit up on Reddit is probably more factually correct.
It would be nice if he decides to sue ars technica for that. Writers and publisher need to learn the hard way that you can't use ai and trust that for publishing stuff that needs factual coherence. If not by ethics, let it be from fear of lawsuits.
Sue them for what? He would have to prove damages and they took it down.
Publicly making false statements using his name isn't a crime by itself in his jurisdiction?
No, there are a bunch of things required to be met in the US for libel and a bunch of precedent which is why it's hard to sue for it and succeed
Ars is just AI slop now? Sad.
Ars is owned by Condé Nast which also owns Reddit, so "AI slop" is part of their business.
I still trust Ars Technica (I don't like them much but I do trust them... it's complicated) and I trust Aurich (their founder/editor-in-chief) to act fairly. They don't work on the weekends or holidays though, so he's not touching it until Tuesday, though.
Aurich is the creative guy, Ken Fisher founded it.
ETA: Confirmed by Wikipedia.
Which ars writer was the article attributed to?
Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland
This is what you get trying offload all your work on ChatGPT.
Better one is when lawyer tries it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM
Hard to keep track of all the recent changes in media ownership, editorial and quality control. Would love a browser plugin to give me an indicator because on the rare occasion I read a publication in say, USA, it might have had a good rep last time I read it several years ago. I imagine managing the detailed scores that a plugin might pull from would be a mammoth task, though.
