The Condé Nast-owned Ars Technica has terminated senior AI reporter Benj Edwards following a controversy over his role in the publication and retraction of an article that included AI-fabricated quotes, Futurism has confirmed.
Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars‘ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.” He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.” (404 Media first reported on the retraction.)
Shortly after Fisher’s editor’s note was published, Edwards, one of the report’s two bylined authors, took to Bluesky to take “full responsibility” for the inclusion of the fabricated quotes.
In the post, Edwards said that he was sick at the time, and “while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep,” he “unintentionally made a serious journalistic error” as he attempted to use an “experimental Claude Code-based AI tool” to help him “extract relevant verbatim source material.” He said the tool wasn’t being used to generate the article, but was instead designed to “help list structured references” to put in an outline. When the tool failed to work, said Edwards, he decided to try and use ChatGPT to help him understand why.
“I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words,” Edwards continued. He emphasized that the “text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars‘ editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that.”
Edwards also stressed that his colleague Kyle Orland, the site’s senior gaming editor who co-bylined the retracted story, had “no role in this error.”
The controversy was met with a wave of pushback and speculation from Ars readers, many of whom expressed deep frustration and disappointment in a lengthy comment thread on the website. On February 27, Ars creative director Aurich Lawson, while closing the comment thread, said that “Ars has completed its review of this matter” and that “the appropriate internal steps have been taken.”
“In the coming weeks, we’ll publish a reader-facing guide explaining how we use and do not use AI in our work,” Lawson wrote. “We do not comment on personnel decisions.”
As of February 28, Edwards’ bio on Ars was changed to past tense, according to an archived version of the webpage. It now reads that Edwards “was a reporter at Ars, where he covered artificial intelligence and technology history.”
Futurism reached out to Ars, Condé Nast, and Edwards to inquire about the reporter’s employment status. Neither the publication nor its owner replied. Edwards said he was unable to comment at this time.
Ars‘ retraction isn’t the first AI controversy to rock a newsroom, nor to anger a publication’s readers. It also comes at a moment in which many media bosses are pushing staff to find uses for AI — as are executives across most industries — even while clear guidelines around use of the technology that uphold editorial ethics remain elusive.
These edicts to integrate AI, meanwhile, are backdropped by a complicated, ever-shifting landscape: contentious copyright battles between news giants and AI companies; simultaneous deal-striking by news giants and AI companies; an internet increasingly full of AI-generated slop news and misinformation; and a traffic cliff tied to Google’s “AI Overviews,” which now paraphrase news instead of pointing readers to a list of blue links.
It’s a combustive, disorienting moment in the history of media and technology, when lines in the sand are being drawn by both journalists and their audiences. And the Ars fallout underlines a phenomenon we’ve seen again and again, as even people who are deeply familiar with AI and its shortcomings can end up relying on it at a critical moment — and in the process, fall victim to something much older than generative AI: human error.
“The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me,” Edwards said in his February 15 Bluesky post. “I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part.”
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