Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies.
In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.
There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.
I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.
you're participating in a social media site where something like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do something and write this article about it." So put your money where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.
Last year I went viral, and Benji was the first person to interview me. It was a really cool experience, we chatted via Twitter dms, and he wrote a piece about my work - overall did a decent job.
Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he wanted to cover us. No response.
Then, tech crunch wrote an article on our project.
I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded, but said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive that he could only report on things that didn't have any prior or pre-existing coverage (?)
I thought that was rather strange, especially since we already had built up a relationship.
I don't really have a moral or lesson to this story, other than that journalism can be rather opaque sometimes.
Oh one other tip for anyone reading this - if you do ever get reached out to by journalists, communicate in writing, not a phone call so you can be VERY precise in your wordings.
I know a lot of people that don't get through their email every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time, with the volume of communication required by daily work.
I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years.
I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.
It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles
I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.
It is scary but also exciting. As long as there are humans making informed decisions, there will be demand for quality sources of information. But to keep up with AI, content sites will need to raise their standards. Less intrusive ads, less superficial stuff, more in-depth articles with complex yet easily navigable structure, with layers of citations, diagrams, data, and impeccable accuracy. News articles with the technical depth of today's dissertations.
The headline says Ars fired the reporter, but AFAICT the article doesn't include any facts that indicate this. All we know is that he no longer works there, and that Ars refused to provide any additional information.
As much as I respect the site and gladly financially support it, this is ultimately a failure on Ars Technica and its editors. If there are any.
If this were just some random blogger, then yes the blame is totally theirs. But this was published under the Ars Technica masthead and there should have been someone or something double checking the veracity of the contents.
That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that are among the best in their fields: Eric Burger, Dan Goodin, Beth Mole, Stephen Clark, and Andrew Cunningham amongst many, so one f'up shouldn't really impugn the entire organization.
I don't know that this is what happened here, but any time there is a push to do more with less, you end up rewarding people who take shortcuts over those who do a proper job, and from the outside, it looks like journalism has a push to do more with less.
“Edwards also stressed that his colleague Kyle Orland, the site’s senior gaming editor who co-bylined the retracted story, had ‘no role in this error.’”
Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing fraudulent quotes.
Is there something to the story that I'm missing? Why does Orland need to apologize? Edwards fabricated the quotes via AI and seemingly presented them to Orland as authentic. Orland had no reason to suspect the quotes weren't real until after publishing.
When journalists are working on a shared byline, they don't each do the same research in order to fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of trust required for collaborating like this and Edwards violated that trust.
You can say this is a failure by the editorial process for not including fact checking, but that is an organizational issue with Ars, it's not the fault of Orland for failing to duplicate the work that he believed his coauthor did.
Yeah, consider the same thing in other domains - e.g. say you're doing some code review and the PR author is a cowoker you've had for years, and they include a comment with a link to some canonical documentation along with a verbatim quote from said doc explaining usage of something in the PR. If the quote and usage both make sense in the context, I'm not going to be habitually clicking through to the docs to verify that the quote isn't actually fabricated.
I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.
When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?
The headline is a bit sensational considering all we know from the reporting is that he isn't working there anymore. Fired likely, sure, but not for a fact.
Using AI to generate articles is just admitting that you have nothing unique to offer. If I want to read some AI slop that may or may not be correct, I can generate it myself (curiously, I never find myself doing this).
Ars Technica has lost a lot of credibility with this incident and how it was handled.
Happy to see some accountability here. Athough it's unclear why the other co-author who stamped their name on that article was retained. Maybe they just stamped their name to meet their quota of articles. In any case this follow up action makes me take arstechnica standards a bit more seriously.
people have said enough about the ethics of all of it but what I found even sadder is that the story made me curious to take a look at the actual piece he "investigated" with AI, it's this one (https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...) This is btw a bit more than 1k words, which takes the average American reader, not senior journalist, ~5 minutes.
This whole story involved asking Claude to mine this text for quotes, which refused because it included harassment related content, then asking ChatGPT to explain that, and so on.
That entire ordeal probably generated more text from the chatbots than just reading the few paragraphs of the blogpost. That's why I think the "I'm sick" angle doesn't matter much. This is the same brainrot as people who go "grok what does this mean" under every twitter post. It's like a schoolchild who cheats and expends more energy cheating than just learning what they're supposed to.
So the original blogger got slandered by an LLM agent, then got slandered again by a human journalist who used an LLM agent to write the article about him getting slandered by an LLM agent? How ironic.
But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the journalist? New questions for the new agentic society.
He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting. But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander isn't just a synonym of "lie".
I think that's the nail in the coffin. Most others could say it was a giant whoopsie, but here it goes to the heart of their credibility. How could they continue write authoritatively about AI, having done this.
> while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep," he "unintentionally made a serious journalistic error" as he attempted to use an "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool" to help him
Oh right, being ill is what caused the error. I can bet that if you start verifying the past content from this author, you will see similar AI slop. Either that or he has been always ill with very little sleep.
The crazy part to me is that even here on HN there are people who still insist that LLMs don't fabricate things or otherwise lie.
I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business.
Sure there is such a thing as a naysayer but there are also people think all forms of valid criticism are just naysaying.
Can you elaborate? Perhaps I haven't noticed that they push pro-sponsored content (what does this mean, exactly?). I do find their comment section to be pretty lousy, and very partisan. But the tech coverage always seemed fair enough. What am I missing?
He was supposed to be their "Senior AI Reporter." Him including basically anything from LLMs, without verifying it, in articles not only demonstrates a complete lack of credibility as a writer, but also a complete lack of understanding of AI. Even if they might have personally wanted to keep him on, you just can't after something like this.
What is the connection between these two statements? Are we supposed to presume that someone who apologizes on Bluesky should never be fired? Or did you also read the article and thought this was important information?
Is it “plagiarism” to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren’t taken, but plagiarism doesn’t seem like the right word.
"Slop" and "hallucinate" have meanings outside of AI too, but it's easier to repurpose existing words than come up with a whole new lexicon for AI failure modes.
The raison d’etre for the journalist, in AD 2026, is less to gather information than to verify it. The journalist who cannot be trusted is no journalist at all. He is a blogger.
"Apologized on Blue Sky" is absolutely no reason to keep them. The author did the absolutely worst things a journalist can do (short of actual corruption) and is unfit for the job:
- He didn't care for his story,
- he didn't care to verify his story,
- he published bullshit made up stuff,
- and put words in a real person's mouth
- and he didn't even care to write the thing himself
Why keep him and pay him? What mentality all the above show? What respect, both self respect and respect for the job?
If they wanted stories from an LLM, they can pay for a subscription to one directly.
Hope this sends a message to journalist hacks who offload their writing or research to an LLM.
That's the thing. I feel kinda bad for Benj, I don't wish him ill, and maybe he keeps writing on his own site and/or other places, but I don't see any way that he could have kept writing for Ars.
Journalists and bloggers usually write about others’ mess ups and apologies, dissecting which apologies are authentic and which apologies are non-apologies.
In this incident, Aurich Lawson of Ars Technica deleted the original article (which had LLM hallucinated quotes) instead of updating it with the error. He then published a vague non-apology, just like large companies and politicians usually do. And now we learn that this reporter was fired and yet Ars Technica doesn’t publish a snippet of an article about it.
There’s something to be said about the value of owning up to issues and being forthright with actions and consequences. In this age of indignation and fear of being perceived as weak or vulnerable due to honesty, I would’ve thought that Ars would be or could’ve been a beacon for how things should be talked about.
It’s sad to see Ars Technica at this level.
It seemed to me like very hasty self defense, there's a lot of AI slop hate and Ars can't risk becoming known as slop when their readers are probably prone to be aware of the issue.
I don't think Ars thought they had a choice but to cut off the journalist who made the mistake, especially when it was regarding a very touchy subject. I don't think they had a choice, it's impossible for us readers to know if this was a single lapse of judgement or a bad habit. Regardless, the communication should have been better.
you're participating in a social media site where something like 20% of the articles have become, "I told Claude Code to do something and write this article about it." So put your money where your mouth is, if you think it's sad, if this is more than concern trolling, hit Ctrl+W.
I have a story with Benji.
Last year I went viral, and Benji was the first person to interview me. It was a really cool experience, we chatted via Twitter dms, and he wrote a piece about my work - overall did a decent job.
Then, 6 months later a separate project I was adjacent to was starting to pick up steam. I reached out to him asking if he wanted to cover us. No response.
Then, tech crunch wrote an article on our project.
I reached to Benji again saying "Hey would you like to chat again, now we have some coverage?" And he finally responded, but said he couldn't report on me because he had a directive that he could only report on things that didn't have any prior or pre-existing coverage (?)
I thought that was rather strange, especially since we already had built up a relationship.
I don't really have a moral or lesson to this story, other than that journalism can be rather opaque sometimes.
Oh one other tip for anyone reading this - if you do ever get reached out to by journalists, communicate in writing, not a phone call so you can be VERY precise in your wordings.
Sometimes people get busy and overwhelmed, but they don't know how to say no.
I know a lot of people that don't get through their email every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time, with the volume of communication required by daily work.
I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links. It's scary that it got from 'practically useless' to 'the actual google search' in less than two years.
I really don't know where the internet is heading to and how any content site can survive.
> I have to admit, nowadays Google AI Overview's accuracy is so good that I often don't check the links.
How would you know?
It's because the AI overview is most of the time directly summarising the search results rather than synthesizing an answer from internal model knowledge. Which is why it can hyperlink the sources for the facts now. Even a very dumb lightweight model can extract relevant text from articles
I just can't see how this is sustainable since they are stealing from the sources who are now getting defunded.
It is scary but also exciting. As long as there are humans making informed decisions, there will be demand for quality sources of information. But to keep up with AI, content sites will need to raise their standards. Less intrusive ads, less superficial stuff, more in-depth articles with complex yet easily navigable structure, with layers of citations, diagrams, data, and impeccable accuracy. News articles with the technical depth of today's dissertations.
It will cycle.
Without the content site the AI overview will become useless
Context from earlier discussion of the article being pulled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949
Thanks! and indeed - here's the sequence (in the usual reverse order). If there are missing threads we can add them...
OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments)
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (82 comments)
Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments)
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (624 comments)
AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments)
The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)
An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (951 comments)
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)
The headline says Ars fired the reporter, but AFAICT the article doesn't include any facts that indicate this. All we know is that he no longer works there, and that Ars refused to provide any additional information.
As much as I respect the site and gladly financially support it, this is ultimately a failure on Ars Technica and its editors. If there are any.
If this were just some random blogger, then yes the blame is totally theirs. But this was published under the Ars Technica masthead and there should have been someone or something double checking the veracity of the contents.
That said, there are a number of Ars Technica contributors that are among the best in their fields: Eric Burger, Dan Goodin, Beth Mole, Stephen Clark, and Andrew Cunningham amongst many, so one f'up shouldn't really impugn the entire organization.
I don't know that this is what happened here, but any time there is a push to do more with less, you end up rewarding people who take shortcuts over those who do a proper job, and from the outside, it looks like journalism has a push to do more with less.
“Edwards also stressed that his colleague Kyle Orland, the site’s senior gaming editor who co-bylined the retracted story, had ‘no role in this error.’”
Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing fraudulent quotes.
"I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published."
Nothing suspicious about heavy use of qualifiers in a non-apology blanket denial. Where's the Polymarket for whether this guy has a job next month?
https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...
> whether this guy has a job next month?
That’s a problem. If he really hasn’t apologized, neither he nor Ars have recognized there is a problem, which means it will happen again.
Is there something to the story that I'm missing? Why does Orland need to apologize? Edwards fabricated the quotes via AI and seemingly presented them to Orland as authentic. Orland had no reason to suspect the quotes weren't real until after publishing.
When journalists are working on a shared byline, they don't each do the same research in order to fact-check each other. There is inherently a level of trust required for collaborating like this and Edwards violated that trust.
You can say this is a failure by the editorial process for not including fact checking, but that is an organizational issue with Ars, it's not the fault of Orland for failing to duplicate the work that he believed his coauthor did.
Yeah, consider the same thing in other domains - e.g. say you're doing some code review and the PR author is a cowoker you've had for years, and they include a comment with a link to some canonical documentation along with a verbatim quote from said doc explaining usage of something in the PR. If the quote and usage both make sense in the context, I'm not going to be habitually clicking through to the docs to verify that the quote isn't actually fabricated.
I clicked through the author's earlier stories when this first made waves. I obviously had no proof, but I was pretty certain that he's been using LLMs to generate stories for a good while.
When Ars released a statement saying this was an isolated incident, my reaction was "they probably didn't look too hard". I suspect they did, in the end?
In defense of that, his writing style was basically the same long before LLMs.
Sad if true. I used to really enjoy reading his freelance articles in various publications pre-AI.
The headline is a bit sensational considering all we know from the reporting is that he isn't working there anymore. Fired likely, sure, but not for a fact.
Using AI to generate articles is just admitting that you have nothing unique to offer. If I want to read some AI slop that may or may not be correct, I can generate it myself (curiously, I never find myself doing this).
Ars Technica has lost a lot of credibility with this incident and how it was handled.
Happy to see some accountability here. Athough it's unclear why the other co-author who stamped their name on that article was retained. Maybe they just stamped their name to meet their quota of articles. In any case this follow up action makes me take arstechnica standards a bit more seriously.
Good time to watch Shattered Glass.
Imagine what he could have gotten up to with LLMs.
people have said enough about the ethics of all of it but what I found even sadder is that the story made me curious to take a look at the actual piece he "investigated" with AI, it's this one (https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...) This is btw a bit more than 1k words, which takes the average American reader, not senior journalist, ~5 minutes.
This whole story involved asking Claude to mine this text for quotes, which refused because it included harassment related content, then asking ChatGPT to explain that, and so on.
That entire ordeal probably generated more text from the chatbots than just reading the few paragraphs of the blogpost. That's why I think the "I'm sick" angle doesn't matter much. This is the same brainrot as people who go "grok what does this mean" under every twitter post. It's like a schoolchild who cheats and expends more energy cheating than just learning what they're supposed to.
The role "reporter" deserves very little credence in AI now. The public might be better off if they get their information on AI from ChatGPT.
The core story is literally about how AI made up facts. The solution is more of the same?
So the original blogger got slandered by an LLM agent, then got slandered again by a human journalist who used an LLM agent to write the article about him getting slandered by an LLM agent? How ironic.
But, does that mean he got slandered twice by an LLM agent or once by an agent and once by a human? Or was he technically slandered 3 times? Twice by agents and a third time by the journalist? New questions for the new agentic society.
He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting. But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander isn't just a synonym of "lie".
No, the journalist came in and slandered the LLM Twice and Jim Fell.
"Who are you, and how did you lose your job?"
"I'm an AI reporter. And, I'm an AI reporter."
4 times, you forgot the owner of the bot that did the PR.
> senior AI reporter
A true "senior" AI reporter should be more skeptical of LLM output than anyone else.
I think that's the nail in the coffin. Most others could say it was a giant whoopsie, but here it goes to the heart of their credibility. How could they continue write authoritatively about AI, having done this.
I dunno. If AI doesn't write your articles, are you even an AI reporter?
Sorry, I never could resist a good dad joke
> while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep," he "unintentionally made a serious journalistic error" as he attempted to use an "experimental Claude Code-based AI tool" to help him
Oh right, being ill is what caused the error. I can bet that if you start verifying the past content from this author, you will see similar AI slop. Either that or he has been always ill with very little sleep.
The crazy part to me is that even here on HN there are people who still insist that LLMs don't fabricate things or otherwise lie.
I wonder if these are the same people who 3-4 years ago were insisting putting 20 characters onto a blockchain (ie an NFT, which was just a URL) was the next multi-billion dollar business.
Sure there is such a thing as a naysayer but there are also people think all forms of valid criticism are just naysaying.
[flagged]
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? I just had to ask you this in a different context.
You may not owe your least favorite publications better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
You probably wish everyone would post as bots do, without em—dashes of course.
Sorry but I don't follow
Can you elaborate? Perhaps I haven't noticed that they push pro-sponsored content (what does this mean, exactly?). I do find their comment section to be pretty lousy, and very partisan. But the tech coverage always seemed fair enough. What am I missing?
So they fired that author after the author had publicly apologized on Blue sky.
He was supposed to be their "Senior AI Reporter." Him including basically anything from LLMs, without verifying it, in articles not only demonstrates a complete lack of credibility as a writer, but also a complete lack of understanding of AI. Even if they might have personally wanted to keep him on, you just can't after something like this.
What is the connection between these two statements? Are we supposed to presume that someone who apologizes on Bluesky should never be fired? Or did you also read the article and thought this was important information?
Why would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?
Is it “plagiarism” to misattribute hallucinated quotes? Not that a whole lot of sloppy, unprofessional shortcuts weren’t taken, but plagiarism doesn’t seem like the right word.
"Slop" and "hallucinate" have meanings outside of AI too, but it's easier to repurpose existing words than come up with a whole new lexicon for AI failure modes.
The raison d’etre for the journalist, in AD 2026, is less to gather information than to verify it. The journalist who cannot be trusted is no journalist at all. He is a blogger.
"Apologized on Blue Sky" is absolutely no reason to keep them. The author did the absolutely worst things a journalist can do (short of actual corruption) and is unfit for the job:
- He didn't care for his story,
- he didn't care to verify his story,
- he published bullshit made up stuff,
- and put words in a real person's mouth
- and he didn't even care to write the thing himself
Why keep him and pay him? What mentality all the above show? What respect, both self respect and respect for the job?
If they wanted stories from an LLM, they can pay for a subscription to one directly.
Hope this sends a message to journalist hacks who offload their writing or research to an LLM.
Can you name any other way for Ars Technica to handle this situation without permanently soiling their reputation?
That's the thing. I feel kinda bad for Benj, I don't wish him ill, and maybe he keeps writing on his own site and/or other places, but I don't see any way that he could have kept writing for Ars.
That absolutely should be career-ending for a journalist, apology or no