Utter bullshit. If you use AI at any point in generating the work product, that work product is AI-gemerated. Even if it’s a fecklessly lazy churnalist organising their notes.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Happy cake day
Welcome to discourse in a post-truth society. Reality doesn't matter anymore; news agencies can just make shit up, and even the comments on the fake articles are fake.
Rail against it, until it's the only thing you ever do. A single bot can still post a thousand times more, and on a thousand different accounts, and on a thousand different platforms. Just one of them can formulate fake ideas and then fake arguments with itself that enfold like a fractal, and there is an effectively infinite number of them.
Kessler Syndrome is happening before our very eyes, only on a much more local scale.
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Damn. Am I gonna have to cancel my Ars subscription now? Every damn thing is enshittifying these days
It used to be respectable ten years ago, back when it had a .co.uk website too.
Right? Who's next, Pro Publica?
Ars Technica has published a retraction
edit: Benj Edwards, the author responsible, has posted his side. tl;dr: He was sick and he messed up, and he asked for the article to be pulled because he was too sick to fix it right away.
I don't care he's "sick". Too often, someone, instead of taking accountability, just throws anything to maybe shield themselves from actually being fully accountable. "I was sick", "Family problems", "A recent death", "The planets were misaligned that day", etc.
I find it to still be cowardice, to not stand by and own what you said, even if it was wrong. He used AI and got caught. And going forward, I'll be treating Ars Technica as an unreliable AI-generated "news source".
The whole purpose of a news reporter is kind of to get their news right.
If they can't do that, their service is worthless.
That's the old way of doing news.
The new way of doing news is generating news that favors the news reporters' financial backers.
I signed up to Ars 9 years ago. It is painful to transparently witness the decay.
Benj Edwards handles most of their AI coverage. I wouldn't take his use of AI as a sign of what the rest of the staff is doing.
He did own it.
I disagree, clearly. Owning would be "yes, I messed up, I used AI to write my process and didn't bother reviewing any of it, I took shortcuts". That and just that. Using "I was feeling sick" is deflecting blame instead of owning it.
He's saying he didn't respond sooner because his bosses told him not to until they released a statement, then be got such which it's why he didn't respond sooner. We're saying the same thing bub.
At least they owned up to it instead of pretending it didn't happen like other "news" organizations in the past.
Now somebody needs to post about this on Reddit, so The Verge can make an AI generated piece based on the post!
could you elaborate on the verge?
And charge you to read it. The Verge is mostly (all?) paywalled these days.
I'd say they used to be good, but then I'd be lying. I still remember when The Verge shit all over the Galaxy Note, then praised the iPhone 6 Plus to high heaven. Even as an Apple guy, the bias stunk.
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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
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I pointed out a month ago that Ars Technica is a rot site and starting to be filled with AI regurgitated bullshit and got 80+ down votes and a few uneducated replies.
Y'all feel better now?
Apparently you still can't criticise the Holy Ars even when they put out AI slop articles, because that's SPITTING ON BABIES
No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an "internet rot site" is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.
You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?
You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.
It's one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an "internet rot site."
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It’s been going downhill for some time. I think the Condé Nast investment pretty much killed it. The last unnecessary site redesign that didn’t work correctly and made things unreadable was the last straw for me. I took it out of my rotation of “daily reads” and haven’t missed it.
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It would be nice if he decides to sue ars technica for that. Writers and publisher need to learn the hard way that you can't use ai and trust that for publishing stuff that needs factual coherence. If not by ethics, let it be from fear of lawsuits.
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This is bad enough that a serious company that wanted to salvage their reputation properly might wanna consider putting in some weekend overtime.
Frankly, no. Correcting an article about a blog post isn't important enough to force your workers to sacrifice their weekends.
That should be reserved to life-and-death emergencies.
Now what to do about the lazy writer who used AI to write the article and didn't bother fact check it and make sure the quotes are real?
Fixing the article, weekend or next week, doesn't address the problem itself.
That should be reserved to life-and-death emergencies.
Well, they are going to see how many will keep their subscription then.
From the authors blog post:
You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone. … This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it. – OpenClaw default SOUL.md
This makes me very sad. In the "early days" of the internet, it was a place where people were "good". Yes, there were trolls, but you could often ignore and avoid them.
Now, with the pressure to make "AI useful" and more human-like - the line between AI and people is blurring and will continue to blur.
It's easy to create an army of AI trolls and it's only going to get easier as time goes on. Yet, no-one is interested in an "army of non-troll AI's" ("... that's a super post. Very insightful. People will love it. Good job, here's your gold star!"). So, people with opinions are the minority on a text based internet and this trend will only continue.
As a technical exercise, I think "how can I ferret out the human posts/content?" Yeah, Ars said that they tag posts when it was written by AI (....riiiiiight...). This means I need to blindly trust them and any other company.
The only (reliable) solution, I can think of, is to destroy, cripple, or sacrifice the anonymous "tenant" of the internet. And, as a privacy focused individual, this makes me very sad.
'Arse' technica 🤣🤣🤣
Ars is just AI slop now? Sad.
Ars is owned by Condé Nast which also owns Reddit, so "AI slop" is part of their business.
I still trust Ars Technica (I don't like them much but I do trust them... it's complicated) and I trust Aurich (their founder/editor-in-chief) to act fairly. They don't work on the weekends or holidays though, so he's not touching it until Tuesday, though.
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Which ars writer was the article attributed to?
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