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Ars writers likely used AI to hallucinate quotes from the blog “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me” (web.archive.org)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Likely AI, because otherwise they just made up some quotes on their own. Either is egregious journalistic malpractice. But we all know which one it was.

The maintainer reported in the comments of the article that he is exclusively misquoted in the 2nd half of the article (including misquoted calling himself a “gatekeeper”).

Edit: I did confirm all misquotes from archive versions of the blog and ars article. But I also read the blog yesterday and have memory and it hasn’t changed

Edit 2: Ars took down the article, replaced with archive.org. And here’s the blog archive version

https://web.archive.org/web/20260213082753/https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

Edit 3: they have posted a retraction notice and the original link now says the story is retracted instead of being a 404 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/

Edit 4:
The maintainer, Scott, posted about getting AI zooped twice as well:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/

Edit 5: the retraction notice is shit; doesn’t even say what was retracted. It also makes it sound like only the quotes were the only LLM-generated thing; it’s much much more likely the latter half of the article is LLM-generated in its entirety

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[–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Ars has been on a downward slide in quality for a while in my opinion. Just the other day there was an announcement from NASA about astronauts being able to take smartphones to space and the Ars article mentioned iPhones specifically in the headline and the article despite the press release not naming brands.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    I saw that, too. They made it sound like only iPhones could be brought in. At worst, they lied. At best, they acted like boomer parents calling all consoles Nintendo. For a tech blog to look at three iPhones, a Galaxy S25, a Motorola flip, a Galaxy A-series, and some Huawei phone and say "those are all iPhones," it's not a good look on them. Especially when the term "smartphones" is right there (and predates the iPhone).

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