Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
arstechnica.com
We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.
  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    151·
    8 days ago

    On 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.

    That 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.

    Ars 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.

    We regret this failure and apologize to our readers. We have also apologized to Mr. Scott Shambaugh, who was falsely quoted.

    Nothing about who put it in there or what you’re doing to them?

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
      91·
      8 days ago

      We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

      It sounds like they will be reminding their team not to do that and scrutinizing articles in the near future

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        513·
        8 days ago

        Someone deserves to be fired. Just imagine you’re paying someone to do a job and they just 100% completely outsource it to a machine in 5 seconds and then goes home.

          • Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@mstdn.social
            3·
            8 days ago

            @GammaGames this.

            The editors are ultimately responsible for this, and they are owning up, @artyom. This is how it should be. There will probably be internal consequences to whoever wrote the piece and included the slop-quotes, but the buck stops with the editors as far as anyone outside is concerned.

            Otherwise editors could just blame every slip-up and failure on the intern (whoever the intern is that week) and publicly fire them, having a nice public execution instead of real accountability.

        • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          32·
          8 days ago

          So you’re calling for someone to be fired without actually reading the article or understanding the situation? What punishment do you deserve for your laziness?