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
Edit 3: they have posted a retraction notice and the original link now says the story is retracted instead of being a 404 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/
Edit 4:
The maintainer, Scott, posted about getting AI zooped twice as well:
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
Edit 5: the retraction notice is shit; doesn’t even say what was retracted. It also makes it sound like only the quotes were the only LLM-generated thing; it’s much much more likely the latter half of the article is LLM-generated in its entirety
I saw that, too. They made it sound like only iPhones could be brought in. At worst, they lied. At best, they acted like boomer parents calling all consoles Nintendo. For a tech blog to look at three iPhones, a Galaxy S25, a Motorola flip, a Galaxy A-series, and some Huawei phone and say “those are all iPhones,” it’s not a good look on them. Especially when the term “smartphones” is right there (and predates the iPhone).