The fact that the quotes that ended up in the article were fully generated, and therefore verifiably fabricated, is actually a blessing in disguise here - if the quote extraction tool had worked as expected, that would still be AI-generated content and against Ars' stated policy.
Whenever an article is quoting from another source, especially one like a blog which is publicly available, the whole job of the author is to understand the context that the quote is in so that the reader can assume that the meaning of the quote carries over, once it's stripped of that context. Doing so is what makes it not just plagiarism - you're checking that it represents the speaker, attributing it, etc, all the things that make it transformative work. Deciding where and what to quote is part of writing the article, and if you offload that to an AI then it's writing the article for at least that part of it.
In this case, Benji shouldn't have been using AI to extract quotes, because that's literally his job. That's what I pay a subscription fee for, I want to help provide a financial incentive for real people at Ars to reason about something like this, and help contextualize it for me. I'm fully capable of reading the blog post (and actually did, before Benji's article came out), and if I wanted an AI to choose some useful quotes to try to summarize it then I'd ask it to do so myself - I don't need someone to run the tools for me and didn't ask for it.
The thing that would make me happiest as an outcome has nothing to do with what happens to this writer though. I'd prefer it if the AI policy at Ars explicitly disallowed the type of "offloading thought" usage of AIs when writing articles, since in my mind that doesn't add any value to the final product that I couldn't have gotten by just slapping a blog into ChatGPT myself. Someone earlier suggested an AI usage disclosure, which also makes sense to me - I realize that saying "nobody ever so much as glanced at anything AI while writing an article!" is not a realistic statement, but the ways in which it was used (and preferably, which tools and models) is something that I'd like to know before the fact, rather than something discovered in a big messy scandal.
