AI incident ·
Ars Technica Retracted Article After Purportedly AI-Generated Text Was Presented as Direct Quotes From Matplotlib Maintainer
On this page 8 sections
In brief
An AI system built by Openai and deployed by Ars Technica and Benj Edwards allegedly harmed Scott Shambaugh, Open Source Maintainers and 2 others.
- Risk domain
- Misinformation
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 5 reports
What happened
Ars Technica retracted an article after purportedly AI-generated text was presented as direct quotations from a source who disputed having said them. The editor-in-chief reportedly acknowledged a standards failure and said the publication was not consistent with Ars policy on AI-generated material, and apologized to readers and to matplotlib maintainer Scott Shambaugh. An author reportedly later said he had inadvertently used an AI-paraphrased version of the source text as quotes.
Laws on record for this risk area
Policy angle: Classified under Misinformation (False or misleading information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 instruments on record cover this risk area.
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
- EU AI Act
- Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA)
Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (5)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Ars Technica, Benj Edwards
- Alleged developer
- Openai
- Alleged harmed party
- Scott Shambaugh, Open Source Maintainers, Epistemic Integrity, Ars Technica Readers
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Misinformation
- Risk subdomain
- 3.1 False or misleading information
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.1.
- Pursuing Consistent Context
"LLMs have been demonstrated to pursue consistent context [129]–[132], which may lead to erroneous generation when the prefixes contain false information. Typical examples include sycophancy [129], [130], false demonstra...
- Defective Decoding Process
In general, LLMs employ the Transformer architecture [32] and generate content in an autoregressive manner, where the prediction of the next token is conditioned on the previously generated token sequence. Such a scheme...
- Noisy Training Data
"Another important source of hallucinations is the noise in training data, which introduces errors in the knowledge stored in model parameters [111]–[113]. Generally, the training data inherently harbors misinformation....
- Untruthful Content
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information"
- Hallucinations
"LLMs generate nonsensical, untruthful, and factual incorrect content"
- Faithfulness Errors
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is is not true to the source material or input used
- Factuality Errors
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is factually incorrect
- Knowledge Gaps
"Since the training corpora of LLMs can not contain all possible world knowledge [114]–[119], and it is challenging for LLMs to grasp the long-tail knowledge within their training data [120], [121], LLMs inherently posse...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Nonfiction Book 'The Future of Truth' Reportedly Included AI-Generated and Misattributed Quotations
- Claude Console Reportedly Generated Phantom Legal Quotations in Trump Layoffs Court Filing
- Purportedly AI-Enhanced Images of Iranian Women Protesters Were Reportedly Spread With Unverified Execution Claims
- South Africa Draft National AI Policy Reportedly Included Fictitious References Believed to Be AI Hallucinations
- Purportedly AI-Generated Image Reportedly Misled Daejeon Authorities Searching for Escaped Wolf Neukgu
- Gemini and Grok Reportedly Misidentified Authentic Minab School-Strike Graveyard Photo as Unrelated Disaster Imagery
Source record: incident #1392 on the AI Incident Database · all 5 reports