this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
646 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
81208 readers
4038 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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~~ [edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle 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.
I would hazard to guess they are investigating how the use of AI was missed in their editorial process, how they missed the incorrect quotes, and who violated their journalistic standards by using an AI to directly write article text since it’s a coauthored piece.
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.
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
Benj and Kyle were the authors of the article; Dan's name wasn't on it.
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.
BenJ had coauthor credit on it.
I'm betting it's definitely Ben since he is pretty pro-AI