Ars Technica fires reporter for AI-fabricated quotes

Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica terminated senior artificial intelligence reporter Benj Edwards for a story that included AI-fabricated quotes, reports Maggie Harrison Dupre of Futurism.

Dupre reports, “Earlier this month, Ars 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 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‘ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, 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.’ He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an ‘isolated incident.’ (404 Media first reported on the retraction.)

“Shortly after Fisher’s editor’s note was published, Edwards, one of the report’s two bylined authors, took to Bluesky to take ‘full responsibility’ for the inclusion of the fabricated quotes.”

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