I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
Super disappointing for Arstechnica here.
Like, how does that even happen?
I’m waiting for Tuesday. Their editor said they’re looking into the suspect AI written article but due to the long weekend are along for patience.
Which, honestly, I find unacceptable. To let something that has the possibility of trashing their reputation to fester for 3 days while their audience has idle time to speculate and spread the issue is just irresponsible. Surely such a risk deserves priority treatment. They’re not new at this. I’m doubly disappointed.
It also is not a good look that they simply made the article disappear without any acknowledgement of why they took it down appearing on the front page. I will give them the benefit of the doubt, for now, that this was not intended as a coverup, but rather was just something they figured they could do quickly to retract the article while working out how to formally respond to what happened (e.g., they may need to fire the person involved). However, as you said, this kind of thing will just cause the matter to fester, especially since they are continuing to publish stories as if nothing had happened.