other.li Forum

@staringatclouds The event is real. The quotes in the story were hallucinated.

@inpc Keep reading the thread friendo

@theorangetheme I think the lock might be SOP for a pulled story. And mods tend not to like rampant speculation.

Aaand the full comments thread from the original story: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name.1511649/

Putting this here so all can see it. Ars forum thread where the pull and investigation are mentioned: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/

@theotherbrook Someone else in these replies did!

@catsalad Slop on slop on slop. Literally.

@drsbaitso Was just about to post this, thank you.

@hackillu Nice!

This scoop brought to you by the TTI Intel Feed, which also routinely beats commercial threat intel to the punch on important emerging threats.

https://intel.taggartinstitute.org/

@hackillu 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/

UPDATE: They pulled the story, but I had it up and had SingleFile in my browser, so: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie

@HitokiriEric @mhoye @arstechnica Maybe, but Pepperidge Farm remembers: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie

@SnoopJ @glyph @jalefkowit I can not imagine an explanation of how this occurred that isn't damning.

@cR0w I confirmed myself. Not one of the quotes is real.

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.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name