The UK's Press Gazette Has No Credibility Anymore, It Celebrates Plagiarism and Cheap Misinformation (This Ruins Linux Sites Too)
THIS morning an associate sent us a headsup - noting that the Press Gazette is again pushing LLMs instead of author rights ("Fire the boss and fight for your rights: How publishers can succeed in 2025").
This is saddening. The UK's Press Gazette should know better and do better, but as we noted the other day it is being occupied by charlatans and marketing bunnies - people who sell slopware (literally slop-ware, as in LLM slop, not sloppy software) and other toxic agenda. We had already cautioned about it twice in December [1, 2].
Not only do these charlatans effectively ruin the press and news sites (they get bots to compete with real authorship, and doing so with many flaws - not that people do this flawlessly either). They encourage a form of plagiarism and that even ruins "Linux" sites. Here's a new example from UNIXMen, which used to be a real news site:
Pretty much everything there is spam (or LLM slop, or both) this year. The "pivot" started some time last year; now it's in 'full swing'.
Earlier this month:
- Even Technical Articles and HowTos From UNIXMen Nowadays Seem to be LLM Slop
- Slopwatch: BetaNews Plagiarism and LLM Slop by UNIXMen
UNIXMen is just one of thousands of former news sites that got ruined when people got replaced by LLM slop. Those sites won't survive, but they'll ruin the Web in the process, which means that the Web as we once knew it (a source of information) won't survive either.
Human knowledge used to be valued. Then came a Ponzi scheme that fakes capital gain by eliminating/blurring information, conflating word salads or fake images with "Value" or "Worth" (when reality hits, ask for bailout). █