The Conde Nast-owned tech publication Ars Technica has retracted an article that contained fabricated, AI-generated quotes, according to an editor\u2019s note posted to its website.\u00a0\u201cOn Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said,\u201d Ken Fisher, Ars Technica\u2019s editor-in-chief, said in his note. \u201cThat this happened at Ars is especially distressing. We have covered the risks of overreliance on AI tools for years, and our written policy reflects those concerns. In this case, fabricated quotations were published in a manner inconsistent with that policy. We have reviewed recent work and have not identified additional issues. At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident.\u201dIronically, the Ars article itself was partially about another AI-generated article.\u00a0Last week, a Github user named MJ Rathbun began scouring Github for bugs in other projects it could fix. Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python\u2019s massively popular plotting library, declined a code change request from MJ Rathbun, which he identified as an AI agent. As Shambaugh wrote in his blog, like many open source projects, matplotlib has been dealing with a lot of AI-generated code contributions, but said \u201cthis has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago.\u201d\u00a0OpenClaw is a relatively easy way for people to deploy AI agents, which are essentially LLMs that are given instructions and are empowered to perform certain tasks, sometimes with access to live online platforms. These AI agents have gone viral in the last couple of weeks. Like much of generative AI, at this point it\u2019s hard to say exactly what kind of impact these AI agents will have in the long run, but for now they are also being overhyped and misrepresented. A prime example of this is moltbook, a social media platform for these AI agents, which as we discussed on the podcast two weeks ago, contained a huge amount of clearly human activity pretending to be powerful or interesting AI behavior.\u00a0After Shambaugh rejected MJ Rathbun, the alleged AI agent published what Shambaugh called a \u201chit piece\u201d on its website.\u00a0\u201cI just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad. It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren\u2019t welcome contributors.Let that sink in,\u201d the blog, which also accused Shambaugh of \u201cgatekeeping,\u201d said.\u00a0I saw Shambaugh\u2019s blog on Friday, and reached out both to him and an email address that appears to be associated with the MJ Rathbun Github account, but did not hear back. Like many of the stories coming out of the current frenzy around AI agents, it sounded extraordinary, but given the information that was available online, there\u2019s no way of knowing if MJ Rathbun is actually an AI agent acting autonomously, if it actually wrote a \u201chit piece,\u201d or if it\u2019s just a human pretending to be an AI.\u00a0On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published a story with the headline \u201cAfter a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name.\u201d The article cites Shambaugh\u2019s personal blog, but features quotes from Shambaugh that he didn\u2019t say or write but are attributed to his blog.\u00a0For example, the article quotes Shambaugh as saying \u201cAs autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace. Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.\u201d But that sentence doesn\u2019t appear in his blog. Shambaugh updated his blog to say he did not talk to Ars Technica and did not say or write the quotes in the articles.\u00a0The Ars Technica article, which had two bylines, was pulled entirely later that Friday. When I checked the link a few hours ago, it pointed to a 404 page. I reached out to Ars Technica for comment around noon today, and was directed to Fisher\u2019s editor\u2019s note, which was published after 1pm.\u00a0\u201cArs Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here,\u201d Fisher wrote. \u201cWe regret this failure and apologize to our readers. We have also apologized to Mr. Scott Shambaugh, who was falsely quoted.\u201dKyle Orland, one of the authors of the Ars Technica article, shared the editor\u2019s note on Bluesky and said \u201cI always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"