2026-02-16 04:14:36
The Conde Nast-owned tech publication Ars Technica has retracted an article that contained fabricated, AI-generated quotes, according to an editor’s note posted to its website.
“On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said,” Ken Fisher, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief, said in his note. “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.”
Ironically, the Ars article itself was partially about another AI-generated article.
Last week, a Github user named MJ Rathbun began scouring Github for bugs in other projects it could fix. Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for matplotlib, python’s massively popular plotting library, declined a code change request from MJ Rathbun, which he identified as an AI agent. As Shambaugh wrote in his blog, like many open source projects, matplotlib has been dealing with a lot of AI-generated code contributions, but said “this has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago.”
OpenClaw is a relatively easy way for people to deploy AI agents, which are essentially LLMs that are given instructions and are empowered to perform certain tasks, sometimes with access to live online platforms. These AI agents have gone viral in the last couple of weeks. Like much of generative AI, at this point it’s hard to say exactly what kind of impact these AI agents will have in the long run, but for now they are also being overhyped and misrepresented. A prime example of this is moltbook, a social media platform for these AI agents, which as we discussed on the podcast two weeks ago, contained a huge amount of clearly human activity pretending to be powerful or interesting AI behavior.
After Shambaugh rejected MJ Rathbun, the alleged AI agent published what Shambaugh called a “hit piece” on its website.
“I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad. It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors.
Let that sink in,” the blog, which also accused Shambaugh of “gatekeeping,” said.
I saw Shambaugh’s blog on Friday, and reached out both to him and an email address that appears to be associated with the MJ Rathbun Github account, but did not hear back. Like many of the stories coming out of the current frenzy around AI agents, it sounded extraordinary, but given the information that was available online, there’s no way of knowing if MJ Rathbun is actually an AI agent acting autonomously, if it actually wrote a “hit piece,” or if it’s just a human pretending to be an AI.
On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published a story with the headline “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name.” The article cites Shambaugh’s personal blog, but features quotes from Shambaugh that he didn’t say or write but are attributed to his blog.
For example, the article quotes Shambaugh as saying “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace. Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.” But that sentence doesn’t appear in his blog. Shambaugh updated his blog to say he did not talk to Ars Technica and did not say or write the quotes in the articles.
The Ars Technica article, which had two bylines, was pulled entirely later that Friday. When I checked the link a few hours ago, it pointed to a 404 page. I reached out to Ars Technica for comment around noon today, and was directed to Fisher’s editor’s note, which was published after 1pm.
“Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here,” Fisher wrote. “We regret this failure and apologize to our readers. We have also apologized to Mr. Scott Shambaugh, who was falsely quoted.”
Kyle Orland, one of the authors of the Ars Technica article, shared the editor’s note on Bluesky and said “I always have and always will abide by that rule to the best of my knowledge at the time a story is published.”
2026-02-14 22:00:58
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that kept it reel, fertilized the land, established Martian law, and cooked up an extraterrestrial tempest in a teapot.
First, ever wondered how cities are represented in Soviet propaganda? Look no further. Then: the path to civilization runs through the bums of birds, what the first Martian settlers could learn from unions, and VORTEX CRYSTALS FROM OUTER SPACE.
Before we get started, I wanted to give a little heads-up that I’m currently attending the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting in Phoenix, which is a gathering of people who think science is good and should ideally get better. I think it will be especially interesting this year given the ongoing damage that the Trump administration is inflicting on the science sector in the United States, a trend with global implications.
Next Saturday, we will run a special edition of the Abstract with pictures, interviews, and some of my other takeaways from the meeting. Have a great week until then!
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Certain cities loom large in our collective imagination, not only as distinct skylines but as symbols of specific ideals and values. A fascinating new study explores this idea through the lens of Soviet propaganda by analyzing which major cities show up the most, and least, in popular ‘Novosti Dnya’ (News of the day) newsreels from 1954 to 1986.
“Cultural representations typically contain illuminating biases,” said researchers led by Mikhail V. Tamm of Tallinn University in Estonia. “For example, geographical locations are unequally portrayed in media, creating a distorted representation of the world. Identifying and measuring such biases is crucial to understanding both the data and the socio-cultural processes behind them.”
“Newsreels—short news films shown in cinemas before the evening’s feature film—were influential means of depicting the world for the cinema-goers in the twentieth century, visualizing events, individuals and places that the spectators could read about in the newspapers,” the team continued. “Throughout almost all history of the Soviet Union, the production system and censorship made sure that newsreels reflected the policies of the leadership.”
In other words, these newsreels were designed to communicate the innate “social, economic, political and cultural superiority of the communist system,” according to the study. It’s perhaps no surprise that the Soviet Union’s two most iconic cities—the modern capital Moscow and the past capital St. Petersburg—were disproportionately represented based on a population analysis.
Moscow was visually displayed or mentioned 2,831 times in the team’s newsreel sample, while St. Petersburg trailed at a distance with 339 mentions. These heavy-hitters were followed by Kyiv (95), Riga (73), Minsk (72), and Volgograd (62). Meanwhile, the most-commonly displayed foreign cities (from a Soviet perspective) were led by satellite state capitals Warsaw (64), Berlin (62), and Prague (51), followed by Paris (39), New York City (29), and Tokyo (16).
“Contrary to the messaging of the official Soviet ideology, which emphasized equality of nations and anticolonial movement, the silently sold Soviet worldview is heavily centered on Europe being in the role of a privileged or hierarchically higher ‘Other,’ Tamm and his colleagues noted.
“We found that this profound East–West asymmetry is surprisingly underreported in the post-colonial studies of the USSR.”
The team also found overrepresentation in cities with major construction projects, such as the Siberian cities Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk, while other “heartland” regions like the Donbas in Ukraine and Rostov oblast in Russia were given short shrift because they lacked “clear ideological importance beyond their industrial role.”
“Finally, in some cases places are overmentioned seemingly just because it is convenient (close to Moscow) or pleasant (Baltic and Black Sea coasts) to film there,” the team concluded.
Anyway, what a cool and random topic to study. While it is niche, the study offers an opportunity to reflect on the thousands of visual messages we absorb every day and the larger portrait they paint.
In other news…
Bongers, Jacob L. et al. “Seabirds shaped the expansion of pre-Inca society in Peru.” PLOS One.
Seabird excrement is a cheat code to civilization, according to a new study that directly linked the guano trade to flourishing empires of Peru’s Chincha Valley.
“Recent research suggests that guano fertilization may have begun by at least 1000 CE in Tarapacá, northern Chile, yet the origins and regional importance of this fertilizer are poorly understood,” said researchers led by Jacob L. Bongers of the University of Sydney. “Using archaeological, historical, and isotopic data from the Chincha Valley, Peru, we ask: to what extent did seabird guano shape the development of pre-Hispanic societies in the Andes?”
Answer: A lot. Guano, which is sometimes called “white gold” because it is so valuable as a fertilizer, was essential to ensuring an abundance of crops like maize, making it “a potentially widespread driving force of social change among pre-Hispanic societies.”
“Our multidisciplinary dataset provides strong support for pre-Inca seabird guano fertilization, an effective agricultural practice for boosting crop production that is more commonly associated with industrial societies,” the team concluded. In short, it’s good shit.
In addition to these Inca precursors, the researchers noted that the Inca also prized guano, outlawing the killing of guano birds “under penalty of death.” As the saying goes, an eye for a bird bum.
After years of hyping Mars, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pivoted away from the red planet this week because it is “much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.” But the dream of human settlements on Mars lives on in a new study that uses, of all things, the International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union as case studies for our Martian future.
“We proceed from the assumption that future Martian settlers, whether national or corporate, will be primarily driven by self-interest, competition, and a desire for strategic or economic advantage,” said authors Alexander H. Ferdinand Ferguson and Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. “We do not assume an inherent desire for equitable sharing.”
“However, we argue that the Martian environment itself imposes a unique and brutal logic that compels cooperation on a foundational technical level,” they added. “On Earth, non-cooperation on technical standards typically leads to inefficiency; on Mars, it can lead to catastrophic, mission-ending failure.”
The study goes on to point to the two expansive unions as “powerful historical precedents” for establishing clear standards between independent actors that are operating without a central territorial government which they say is “one of the challenges Mars settlements will face.”
Who knows if the rubber will ever meet the regolith on these ideas, but I’m personally more comfortable looking to international telecom and postal unions for guidance on governance than space billionaires.
This week in science from the enchanted spellbook, astronomers have concocted miniature vortex crystals from outer space right here on Earth. Though they sound like hex ingredients, these crystals are actually enormous cyclonic storms that rage at Jupiter’s poles, which cluster together into intricate patterns of equilateral triangles, inspiring the distinctive name.
Now, scientists led by Djihane Benzeggouta of Aix Marseille University have “experimentally reproduced long-lived vortex crystals like those at Jupiter’s poles” in fluid tanks with a mix of fresh and saltwater, according to the new work.
“We present an experimental model in which three similar cyclonic vortices are released into the upper layer of a rotating, two-layer stratified fluid system with a free upper surface, and spontaneously organize into a stable, long-lived vortex crystal,” the team said. “Long-lived” in this case means that the crystals persisted for hundreds of rotations, translating to several minutes.
“Achieving the spontaneous emergence of vortices and crystals from background turbulence remains the ultimate goal,” the researchers concluded.
And on some basic level, isn’t the emergence of crystals from background turbulence the ultimate goal for us all?
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-02-13 23:27:28
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss support and saying RIP to FPDS.
JOSEPH: I think I might make this into a more full article in a couple weeks when it actually happens, but yesterday I realized that FPDS.gov is shutting down. That is the Federal Procurement Data System, a website that includes decades of records showing what the U.S. government bought, from what company, and when. I check it essentially every day, and it has been the basis of countless of my articles at this point. Whether it’s finding an initial lead, or a story in itself, FPDS is behind so many of them.
2026-02-13 05:56:04
Jesse Van Rootselaar, the 18-year-old suspected of killing eight people and injuring 25 in a mass shooting in a secondary school in Canada, created a Roblox game that allowed players to simulate a mass shooting in a level that looks like a shopping mall, Roblox has confirmed.
“We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident as well as any content associated with the suspect,” Roblox told 404 Media in an email. “We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”
2026-02-13 03:34:37
Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle company, and DoorDash, the delivery and gig work platform, have launched a pilot program that pays Dashers, at least in one case, around $10 to travel to a parked Waymo and close its door that the previous passenger left open, according to a joint statement from the company given to 404 Media.
The program is unusual in that Dashers are more often delivering food than helping out a driving robot. It also shows that even with autonomous vehicles, and the future they promise of metropolitan travel without the need for a driver, a human is sometimes needed for the most simple and yet necessary tasks.
2026-02-12 22:14:48
The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that can near instantly geolocate a photo using clues in the image such as architecture and vegetation, with plans to use it in criminal investigations, according to a cache of internal police emails obtained by 404 Media.
The emails provide the first confirmed purchases of GeoSpy’s technology by law enforcement agencies. On its website GeoSpy has previously published details of investigations it says used the technology, but did not name any agencies who bought the tool.
“The Cyber Crimes Bureau is piloting a new analytical tool called GeoSpy. Early testing shows promise for developing investigative leads by identifying geospatial and temporal patterns,” an MDSO email reads.
