873
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
873 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
81286 readers
4316 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Ars Technica has published a retraction
edit: Benj Edwards, the author responsible, has posted his side. tl;dr: He was sick and he messed up, and he asked for the article to be pulled because he was too sick to fix it right away.
I don't care he's "sick". Too often, someone, instead of taking accountability, just throws anything to maybe shield themselves from actually being fully accountable. "I was sick", "Family problems", "A recent death", "The planets were misaligned that day", etc.
I find it to still be cowardice, to not stand by and own what you said, even if it was wrong. He used AI and got caught. And going forward, I'll be treating Ars Technica as an unreliable AI-generated "news source".
The whole purpose of a news reporter is kind of to get their news right.
If they can't do that, their service is worthless.
That's the old way of doing news.
The new way of doing news is generating news that favors the news reporters' financial backers.
I signed up to Ars 9 years ago. It is painful to transparently witness the decay.
He did own it.
I disagree, clearly. Owning would be "yes, I messed up, I used AI to write my process and didn't bother reviewing any of it, I took shortcuts". That and just that. Using "I was feeling sick" is deflecting blame instead of owning it.
He's saying he didn't respond sooner because his bosses told him not to until they released a statement, then be got such which it's why he didn't respond sooner. We're saying the same thing bub.
Benj Edwards handles most of their AI coverage. I wouldn't take his use of AI as a sign of what the rest of the staff is doing.
At least they owned up to it instead of pretending it didn't happen like other "news" organizations in the past.