There's a vast chasm between "whoever wrote this article didn't think to link to a similar issue a year ago" and "the first incident was a malicious hoax".
What the comment suggested was that they're now bringing this up again to get attention (and links) since it's combined with ChatGPT. That's not "malicious", but it's also not exactly "wow, we just realized this happens".
If that's not an accusation of being malicious I don't know what could be.