{"id":51210,"date":"2026-03-10T21:32:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T01:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51210"},"modified":"2026-05-12T14:11:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T18:11:58","slug":"ars-technicas-ai-fabricated-quotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/10\/ars-technicas-ai-fabricated-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Ars Technica’s AI-Fabricated Quotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maggie Harrison Dupré<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>, more context<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica <\/em>has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism<\/em> has confirmed.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Ars <\/em>retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece<\/a> about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars<\/em>’ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note<\/a>, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve enjoyed Edwards’ work over the years and linked to many of his pieces, but obviously this is a very serious offense.<\/p>\n\n

gracelynewhouse<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The individual firing is a distraction from the structural issue. Newsrooms have been cutting editorial staff for a decade, which means the verification layers that would have caught this — fact-checkers, copy editors, senior editors doing source verification — largely don’t exist anymore. Then they adopt AI tools that increase throughput without increasing oversight capacity, and act surprised when fabrication slips through.<\/p>\n

This is a classic systems failure: you remove the safety mechanisms, add a new source of risk, and punish the individual operator. It’s the same pattern you see in industrial accidents.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

This has been going on for a lot longer than a decade. To me, the takeaway is not that it’s the system’s fault but that many of these media brands are operating on undeserved trust. There’s a lot less checking going on than there used be or that you might imagine.<\/p>\n\n

The other interesting point is that Edwards says<\/a> the intent was not to use AI to fabricate quotes but as a tool for processing quotes he already had:<\/p>\n

\n

During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based Al tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual\nwords.<\/p>\n

Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This seems not so different from how I commonly hear people say that they use AI to collect\/extract or reformat information into a table. I’ve never understood, given the propensity for hallucination and citing papers that don’t exist, why such a distillation should be trusted. Yet I know that people are already relying on such LLM-derived works to make decisions. At least with code, you can compile it and test it and read it to see whether it makes sense. With a number in a table cell, how can you easily check where it came from?<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n