Ars Technica, the Condé Nast-owned technology outlet, fired senior AI reporter Benj Edwards after the publication retracted one of his stories over the use of fabricated quotes.

The story in question was, ironically, about an AI agent that generated a hit piece on engineer Scott Shambaugh after he rejected its code.

Edwards and a Condé Nast spokesperson did not respond to immediate requests for comment. Futurism first reported the firing, while 404 Media first reported the retraction.

Edwards’ account of the Shambaugh incident was published on Feb. 13; it was taken down two days later and replaced with an editor’s note by editor-in-chief Ken Fisher that apologized for the story.

The story, Fisher wrote in the Feb. 15 note, had used “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them,” against the outlet’s policy that AI-generated material must be clearly labeled.

My analysis ended up longer than planned.

While I always hate to see reporters lose their jobs, this was the obvious call. I’ve worked on days I shouldn’t have, but that resulted in uninspiring heds, paint-by-numbers design and probably letting some punctuation errors through.

It did not result in manufactured quotes.

I’d imagine (and I have some experience here to make me feel I’m correct) that this was the move of absolute last resort. The timeline between publication and firing suggests a lot of wheels turning in the background, likely including solidifying and clarifying LLM policy such that if this scenario happens again, the consequences will be swift.

We’ll have to wait on Ars’ postmortem to learn more.

I’ve spent enough time in a newsroom to know that innocuous mistakes happen all the time. Ironically, that’s why we used to have multiple layers of editors.

But much like the reporter I had to ban from using spellcheck for using it the worst possible way (selecting the first option, regardless if it was the actual word he wanted), this is not amateur hour.

I hope Benj can land somewhere, but this is already an incredibly tight market for journalists, and this is not a black mark easily explained away. It’s not Jayson Blair-level, but he’s now been national news for two cycles, and there is, in fact, such a thing as bad publicity.