ArsTechnica seemingly using AI to write an article about AI impersonation(arstechnica.com)
6 pointsby AdmiralAsshat7 hours ago3 comments
  • Cyphase5 hours ago
    To be clear, the story here is that Ars Technica published an article featuring quotes from Scott Shambaugh (recently in the news for having an AI bot write a hit piece against him), and Scott commented on the article saying the quotes in the second half of the article were inaccurate (based on my reading, starting from the heading "A new kind of bot problem").

    Wayback Machine archive of the article on Ars: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechni...

    Earliest archive of Scott's blog post that is claimed in the article to be the source of the quotes: https://web.archive.org/web/20260212165418/https://theshambl...

    Early Mastodon post about this situation, with a screenshot of Scott's comment: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065340523529645

    A couple of posts on the Ars forum; the first ends with a reply from a staff member:

    https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

    https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

  • DannyPage6 hours ago
    https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

    > We have pulled the story over concerns that it may have gone against our content policies. I locked the comments, and I'm going to lock this one too, we need some time. We are doing an investigation right now to figure out exactly what happened.

  • Jtsummers7 hours ago
    What's the highly editorialized title based on?

    In case it changes, the submitted title is currently:

      ArsTechnica seemingly using AI to write an article about AI impersonation
    The actual title is:

      After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name
    And the article is not about AI impersonation of anyone which makes AdmiralAsshat's title all the stranger.
    • AdmiralAsshat7 hours ago
      My submission was actually to a comment, in which the article's subject (i.e. the source article's author) showed up and declared that half the quotes attributed to him in the article did not exist in the referenced piece he wrote--suggesting that ArsTechnica's editors had used an AI to write the article, which hallucinated details.

      The article has now been pulled by Ars.

      • Jtsummers6 hours ago
        That makes a lot more sense, but just as a note for the future: HN replaces submission URLs with their canonical URL for most pages (they have disabled this for some where the site's canonical URL is reliably wrong). So when you submitted a link to the comment section, HN stripped that out and replaced it with the link to the article itself. It's done this for years.
    • chrisjj7 hours ago
      I get a (childish) 404.