What's going on here?
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@SnoopJ @glyph @jalefkowit I can not imagine an explanation of how this occurred that isn't damning.
@mttaggart @glyph @jalefkowit laying my personal wager on "someone used the nonsense machine" but agreed, I cannot think of any explanation for this that would be remotely acceptable.
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@mttaggart @glyph @jalefkowit laying my personal wager on "someone used the nonsense machine" but agreed, I cannot think of any explanation for this that would be remotely acceptable.
@mttaggart @glyph @jalefkowit correction: I *can* think of one, and it's "they accidentally quoted from the hit-piece blog articles instead"
But they didn't do that, those don't contain the quotes either.
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@glyph @jalefkowit @mttaggart at the very least, it is egregious malpractice.
@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io @glyph@mastodon.social @jalefkowit@vmst.io @mttaggart@infosec.exchange I am disappointed, although not surprised, that my read on Benj's work at Ars turned out to the accurate one in recent years. Bleh.
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
@mttaggart@infosec.exchange link is dead
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@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io @glyph@mastodon.social @jalefkowit@vmst.io @mttaggart@infosec.exchange I am disappointed, although not surprised, that my read on Benj's work at Ars turned out to the accurate one in recent years. Bleh.
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
Seeing the absolute shit shoveling going on that counts for producing content at Ars over the past well...10-15 years at this point...
I'm not sure anyone should be following them let alone paying them subscription money.
That they are now using AI to write their articles is the least surprising thing ever. What a catastrophic fall from grace.
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
@mttaggart @mhoye Looks like @arstechnica just pulled the article.
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@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io One explanation I can think of is that an editor or Conde Nast higher up generated this using the author's bylines, without their involvement.
I would not put it past Conde Nast. -
What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
@mttaggart i expect better from kyle; i do not trust benj edwards at all. between him and eric berger doing free pr for elon musk ars is in a sorry state right now
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@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io One explanation I can think of is that an editor or Conde Nast higher up generated this using the author's bylines, without their involvement.
I would not put it past Conde Nast.@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io but if his work had been good (which I was not familiar with before I started reading his articles that smacked increasingly more of boosterism) before... well, it certainly seems to fall into the pattern that people are seeing with regards to LLM usage (trusting it more and more without checking, etc).
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
@mttaggart Seems they took it down. Just wow.
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@mttaggart @mhoye Looks like @arstechnica just pulled the article.
@HitokiriEric @mhoye @arstechnica Maybe, but Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
UPDATE: They pulled the story, but I had it up and had SingleFile in my browser, so: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
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@mttaggart @glyph @jalefkowit correction: I *can* think of one, and it's "they accidentally quoted from the hit-piece blog articles instead"
But they didn't do that, those don't contain the quotes either.
@SnoopJ @mttaggart @glyph Looks like the article has been completely deleted.
Aurich said in the comments before it vanished that they were aware of the issue and looking into it. I assume the findings were pretty dire.
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What's going on here? The matplotlib maintainer this story is about correctly notes that all the quotes from his post in the article are made up.
@mttaggart archive dot org link since they took it down: 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/
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UPDATE: They pulled the story, but I had it up and had SingleFile in my browser, so: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
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@mttaggart Crap, they DID?! I still have it open! Anything you want before it goes into the void?
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UPDATE: They pulled the story, but I had it up and had SingleFile in my browser, so: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
@mttaggart a "we have hallucinated too and have pulled the article that was here before" would have been better. Good thing you saved it.
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UPDATE: They pulled the story, but I had it up and had SingleFile in my browser, so: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
This scoop brought to you by the TTI Intel Feed, which also routinely beats commercial threat intel to the punch on important emerging threats.
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@mttaggart And thus we close it.
