Flutterby™! : Ars publishes slop

So Ars Technica wrote a thing on the Scott Shambaugh: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (linked earlier), except that they used an LLM and it synthesized quotes that didn't actually get said or written. @mttaggart@infosec.exchange has a thread on this with receipts and archive links.

From this thread it appears that the slop publication was inadvertent from the editor's perspective.

Edit: Ars Technica: Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

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.

And a mea culpa from the author, summarized by Michael Taggart:

First, this happened while sick with COVID. Second, Edwards claims this was a new experiment using Claude Code to extract source material. Claude refused to process the blog post (because Shambaugh mentions harassment). Edwards then took the blog post text and pasted it into ChatGPT, which evidently is the source of the fictitious quotes. Edwards takes full responsibility and apologizes, recognizing the irony of an AI reporter falling prey to this kind of mistake.