I saw this go down more or less live. I saw the article, but I didn’t bother to fact check it. I came back later and saw the comments, including the Scott guy coming in and saying he never said half that shit and it was implied at least the second half of the article was hallucinated by AI, and then the deafening panicked radio silence from staff (who are usually quick to banter with commenters in the forum).

When I got home from work to tell my wife about it (she’s an artist, so she hates AI more than most), the article had been taken down.

Ars’ de facto head man Aurich (not the guy who founded the site, but the site’s mouthpiece) took responsibility for deleting the article, and promised an investigation Tuesday (as Monday is apparently an American holiday and they are enjoying a 3 day weekend). So I would say watch Ars Tuesday to see what, if anything, they say about it then. He said this in response to a forum post in their help forum calling them out for using AI to write their posts. And he shut that conversation down, too (but did not delete the thread).

I like Ars, though. I used to have an account, and once exchanged many unkind messages with their staff. I always liked their articles, though, and I generally trust them to do the right thing. I assume what happened here was some kind of deadline, one writer asked the other for help and they used a chatbot to write part of it, didn’t check, and called it a day. It was sloppy work and they absolutely deserve to be called out and dragged through the mud, but they should also be given a chance to make it right. Depending on how they handle this, I will continue to read them (and I hope they handle it right).

I used to email the editor with examples of typos after I complained that their articles were in decline and he said they needed examples. So I sent a bunch of examples. That person was very receptive. He even said it was useful because they’d been discussing internally whether or not they were doing well in that area.

A few years ago, someone else took the position. I found out because I emailed the original person and he replied and CC’d the new editor. That person wasn’t receptive and never showed any sign that they cared that I wanted their articles to be high enough quality that I was confident sharing them with people who I thought needed more science regarding social issues.

Guess Ars is not gonna be among the sites that I trust to get things right from here on. And to hell with any editor who was ok with using agents when writing articles cause they clearly don’t have the internal structure to keep that from being a liability.

Getting a “429 Too Many Requests” error.

But if true- this is depressing. I’ve always viewed Ars as a sort of standard bearer when it comes to tech news. Other outlets like The Verge do a lot of “best [product]” articles with affiliate links, and while I understand why, and don’t think they’re being dishonest, it just feels cheap. Seeing Ars fail at basic fact-checking is truly depressing.

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.

Oh no, I love their articles.