this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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346
Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes (futurism.com)
submitted 1 day ago by fubarx@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] XLE@piefed.social 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The comments here around this were so... Off. I guess nothing was certain, but we were supposed to believe that the author was too sick to write an article, but also writing an article and using an AI "tool" at the same time.

Hindsight is 20/20, but popular defenses at the time were

He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right… but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this.

[–] totally_human_emdash_user@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 12 hours ago

I was the one who wrote that comment, and it was not an attempt to excuse all of his actions but a response to the following comment:

Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you’re paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.

Here is the full comment that I wrote, including the part you snipped off at the end:

He wrote the article himself, he just got mixed up when experimenting with using an AI tool to help him extract quotes from a blog entry. (He is the head AI writer, so learning about these tools is his job.) It was nonetheless his failure to check the quotes he was copying from his note to make sure that he got them right… but an important bit of context is that he had COVID while doing all this. Now, arguably he should have taken sick time off instead of trying to work through it (as he admits), but this would have cost him vacation time, and the fact that he even was forced into making this choice is a systemic problem that is not being sufficiently acknowledged.