Nilay Patel - the editor in chief is anti-AI especially when it comes to article content. He doesn’t allow anyone at the company to use generated content except when they are writing an article about AI and even then only to demonstrate a point - e.g. “here’s a comparison of two LLMs with the same prompt”. It was also his decision to stop AI’s from crawling any content on their website.
He used AI to pad the article because that’s what real spam articles do. It had nothing to do with acceptance.