Likely AI, because otherwise they just made up some quotes on their own. Either is egregious journalistic malpractice. But we all know which one it was.
The maintainer reported in the comments of the article that he is exclusively misquoted in the 2nd half of the article (including misquoted calling himself a “gatekeeper”).
Edit: I did confirm all misquotes from archive versions of the blog and ars article. But I also read the blog yesterday and have memory and it hasn’t changed
Edit 2: Ars took down the article, replaced with archive.org. And here’s the blog archive version
I used to email the editor with examples of typos after I complained that their articles were in decline and he said they needed examples. So I sent a bunch of examples. That person was very receptive. He even said it was useful because they’d been discussing internally whether or not they were doing well in that area.
A few years ago, someone else took the position. I found out because I emailed the original person and he replied and CC’d the new editor. That person wasn’t receptive and never showed any sign that they cared that I wanted their articles to be high enough quality that I was confident sharing them with people who I thought needed more science regarding social issues.
Guess Ars is not gonna be among the sites that I trust to get things right from here on. And to hell with any editor who was ok with using agents when writing articles cause they clearly don’t have the internal structure to keep that from being a liability.