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Edit 5: the retraction notice is shit; doesn’t even say what was retracted.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