🎶It's the ciiiiiiircle of slooooooooop🎶

And charge you to read it. The Verge is mostly (all?) paywalled these days.

I'd say they used to be good, but then I'd be lying. I still remember when The Verge shit all over the Galaxy Note, then praised the iPhone 6 Plus to high heaven. Even as an Apple guy, the bias stunk.

I'm always surprised online journals still ask for subscriptions with a straight face for the quality they put out. Someone making shit up on Reddit is probably more factually correct.

Honestly, this whole thing surprises me. I have a lot of respect for Ars Technica. I hope they clean this up and prevent further issues in the future.

What do they have to investigate? Did one of them accidentally get an AI to write the article and then accidentally post the article, like they just fell on the keyboard and accidentally typed in a prompt? Come on.

They know how and why it happened, they are taking the weekend to investigate how to best take their foot from their mouths without eating too much shit

BenJ had coauthor credit on it.

Benj and Kyle were the authors of the article; Dan's name wasn't on it.

Benj was an author: https://web.archive.org/web/20260213194851/https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/

Though in the Ars response they say "Scott's post", so I'm confused.

I'm betting it's definitely Ben since he is pretty pro-AI

No, the issue we are talking about today and calling Ars an "internet rot site" is a huge leap. Yeah, they post shit articles from Wired and such, (they are owned by Conde Nast), but their core writers are still great and have plenty of good articles.

You want credit for what? Over exaggerating an issue then whining about it?

You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then spitting on the baby. It makes no sense.

Sue them for what? He would have to prove damages and they took it down.

Now what to do about the lazy writer who used AI to write the article and didn't bother fact check it and make sure the quotes are real?

Fixing the article, weekend or next week, doesn't address the problem itself.

Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland

Ars is owned by Condé Nast which also owns Reddit, so "AI slop" is part of their business.

I still trust Ars Technica (I don't like them much but I do trust them... it's complicated) and I trust Aurich (their founder/editor-in-chief) to act fairly. They don't work on the weekends or holidays though, so he's not touching it until Tuesday, though.

At least they owned up to it instead of pretending it didn't happen like other "news" organizations in the past.

Guy named Scott runs a GitHub (code base). AI agent (bot acting on behalf of a person, who has yet to come forward) submitted code. Scott rejects it. AI agent writes a "hit piece" (defaming article) on Scott.

Ars Technica, a trusted tech/science blog for nearly 25 years, writes a story about it, but the two authors who worked on it used AI to write the blog entry. Scott calls them out in the comments. At first he's accused of lying or being a bot, but people dig into it and realise Ars Technica made up their quotes.

An Ars Technica user calls them out in their forums for posting AI slop as journalism, and the site's founder and/or owner ("Aurich") promises an investigation, and deletes the article, removing all the comments, and shutting down discussion over what happened until his team can investigate internally.

(Worth noting that Ars Technica is owned by a conglomerate called Condé Nast which also owns Reddit; therefore, Condé Nast is involved with AI, and also other unsavoury stuff, but relevant to this, AI.)