Ars Technica fake AI article on AI accusations

Ars Technica published an article^[1] on a programmer who was being "bullied" by an AI autonomous agent. The article was written using AI, with non-existant quotations. The article was later removed and Ars Technica published an editor's note^[2] explaing what happened.

Background

Scott Shambaugh (contributor of the matplotlib library on github) created a good first issue/first contribution [check needed here of which one was it, seems to be the same for this repo], and got an OpenClaw agent pull request^[3] as fix for the issue. The pull request got closed, the AI Agent got mad, so the AI Agent generated a post on its blog^[4], and also Scott wrote a blog post. ^[5]

Incident

Ars Technica (authors listed are "Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland") wrote an article on the situation, but the hit piece's contained AI allucinated quotations.

Ars Technica's response

The Ars Technica's staff wrote an Editor’s Note explaining briefly explaining what happened. The article author also wrote an apology on BlueSky^[6]

References

↑ Ars Staff (2026-02-13). "Retraction: After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name". ArsTechnica. Archived from the original on 2026-02-13.
↑ Fisher, Ken (2026-02-15). "Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations". ArsTechnica.
↑ @crabby-rathbun (2026-02-10). "[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T". GitHub.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
↑ @crabby-rathbun (2026-02-11). "Commit 83b7d60". GitHub.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
↑ Shambaugh, Scott (2026-02-12). "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me". The Shamblog.
↑ Edwards, Benj (2026-02-15). "Apology". Bluesky. Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick) I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[1] Ars Staff (2026-02-13). "Retraction: After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name". ArsTechnica. Archived from the original on 2026-02-13.

[2] Fisher, Ken (2026-02-15). "Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations". ArsTechnica.

[3] @crabby-rathbun (2026-02-10). "[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T". GitHub.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[4] @crabby-rathbun (2026-02-11). "Commit 83b7d60". GitHub.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

[5] Shambaugh, Scott (2026-02-12). "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me". The Shamblog.

[6] Edwards, Benj (2026-02-15). "Apology". Bluesky. Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick) I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

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