I would fire them and hope that they are blacklisted from ever working in journalism ever again
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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"I ain't never said no such thing" - Albert Einstein
Journalistic integrity? On my internet? Well I never.
Whoa. There are actually consequences? ArsTechnica is actually sorry??
No, the worker was fired and the executive whose job title is making sure that the work submitted is correct was not fired.
The executives will get a bonus this year.
Copy editing won't be an executive's job. But yeah, they didn't do the bare minimum which is concerning, it seems to indicate that they may not do the bare minimum on all of their articles. How much stuff went undiscovered?
I'm not going to outright say that journalist shouldn't use AI to write articles, because it's basically an enforceable rule, but there should be someone at some point whose ultimate responsibility is to make sure that the articles are at least factual, whether they were written by a human or not. Determining whether a quote is legitimate is pretty easy, you just have to Google the quote, if you can't find any other sources you start to ask questions. As I said it's the bare minimum they could have done.
The executives will get a bonus this year.
well of course! they just saved a lot of money on wages, they deserve it!
Controversy... What controversy? It sounds more like blatant journalistic malpractice
"malpractice" would have been not puling the story/issuing a retraction.
It seems like he had humility, but he put his name on an article that had false content that he didn't verify. That's not a mistake so much as it is neglect of due diligence. Simply checking if the important citations in his article were true would have saved him, but he didn't. I can only imagine how many journalists do this without getting caught.
Oh my bad I thought we were talking about the entire Ars team, not the individual author.
A few years ago, blatant journalistic malpractice was a controversy.
When I suggested he be fired on another thread I received several responses saying "he made a mistake" and "he was sick", and many downvotes in return.
I did not downvote you—my instance does not allow or show downvotes, which is really nice!—but he was sick, and he did make a mistake, and him being fired does not make either of those things false.
Also, a ton of people were piling on him in that thread, so you had plenty of company in calling him to be fired.
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.
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Amazing. Just great.
Imagine being confronted for lying and just going "hey it was an accident okay I didn't MEAN to decieve people, I just used the machine known for deceiving people and willingly put my name on its deceptions and it deceived people!" and having people defend you.
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.
You do have a point, after reading the article. That's a bit embarrassing for me, honestly. Ragebait got me again, it seems...
The comments here around this were so... Off. I guess nothing was certain, but we were supposed to believe that the author was too sick to write an article, but also writing an article and using an AI "tool" at the same time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but popular defenses at the time were
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.
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.
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I'm not taking all the credit but I do hope those people who didn't believe me in the past could rightfully take this comment, print it, pull down their pants and shove it up their ass.
It's time to hold journalism with a higher standard and this idea that "well they do alright" and "it was only once" is bullshit sliding into madness.
Just the facts, folks.
Main character moment.
and “it was only once” is bullshit
They checked and then fired the author. I don't see how this is "it was only once" implying nothing changed and it will happen again. Isn't firing the author "holding journalism to a higher standard" already, which you ask for?
Maybe they should do more than just fire a person who was caught using AI. Maybe they should establish a process of independent fact checking before publication, regardless of whether AI was known or intended to be used to produce the article. It is a problem that AI was used in a way that introduced factual errors. It's fair that the person responsible for this was fired. But all processes need quality control. Why hasn't the person who failed to wrap quality control processes around the author fired?
in what world would independent fact checking down to the level of individual quotes be feasible for an online magazine? you can't be serious.
That used to be the standard...
I highly doubt that. how would that even work? a third-party to the publisher would have to check every statement before the issue goes to print. I can't imagine this happening for anything that is not research papers or official reports.
but I happy to learn something new.
That's part of the cost of AI that the AI companies leave to their customers. There is a tradeoff and we know from a long history of for-profit corporate behaviour that they will generally prefer lower short term cost, despite consequent risk and harm. But if the companies that sell AI services don't take care to ensure the outputs are true and the companies that use AI don't take care then that leaves the ultimate customer/consumer to fact check everything. That or simply be oblivious or stop trusting anything. The problem is made worse by the fact that most companies won't disclose their use of AI, because of the adverse impact on their reputation, unless they are compelled to do so. So far, I don't see any legislation to compel disclosure.
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