Oh my bad I thought we were talking about the entire Ars team, not the individual author.

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.

You know that the writer himself is quoted in the OP article, right?

If he had Covid, then why was he working?

but he was sick, and he did make a mistake, and him being fired does not make either of those things false.

No, but I believe they were, nonetheless. Regardless, those things also do not excuse his actions, which is why I said he should be, and ultimately was, fired. And I think that's a positive thing.

Also, a ton of people were piling on him in that thread, so you had plenty of company in calling him to be fired.

The point is, plenty of people were downvoting me and defending him (such as yourself), which is what made it "controversial". I was explaining this to the person who was confused as to why it was controversial.

Actually, he completely admitted to and took full responsibility for his mistake; at no point did he offer an excuse, only an explanation.

To the extent I was defending him, it was because people insisted on painting him in the worst possible light, and on misinterpreting his explanation as an excuse, not because I think that everything that he did was okay.