FUDZilla Has Turned Into LLM Slop and Machine-Generated FUD (New York Times Has Also Just Admitted Moving in That Direction)
Failing news sites, instead of calling it quits with some remaining dignity, are handing control over to LLM slop (pretending to still be active)
FUDZilla used to cover all sorts of FOSS stories in a Mike Magee style (obituary). However, something has not been quite right lately as articles with Nick Farrell's name on them had slop for images and rather poor-quality text. Herman Õunapuu has just called them out on it. He said: "Turns out that my thoughts on Ubuntu were somewhat popular, and it ended up being ingested by an AI slop generator over at Fudzilla, with no links back to the source or anything."
Of course, being slop, it'll get many facts wrong (without explanation as to why it happened or who to blame; they use the term "hallucination" in place of lie, falsehood, libel and so on).
Going to the front page of FUDZilla right now, almost all the images are slop (it wasn't always like this).
Opening one at random:
Sloppy slop slop:
So we'll try to refrain from linking to FUDZilla from now on. Everything is suspect now and the New York Times has admitted dabbling in the same [1,2] (the other journal of record died in darkness).
It seems like they have chosen to become a slopfarm or digital graveyard full of nonsense. What would Magee have to say about that (he quit Fudzilla/FUDZilla 3 years ago)? Why does Google News still include these in its results? Original stories omitted/deranked/delisted while plagiarists rise to the top?
Looking for "Linux" news in Google News right at this moment, near the very top of the results we have sites that are 100% LLM slop:
Likely the same operator: (LLM slop, fake article)
They also use LLM slop for FUD 'articles' that are just LLM-spewed word salads:
There are more. The Web is a pile of garbage. Many people cannot distinguish between real and fake as there's no labelling. This wastes time of real people and confuses many people. █
______
-
Guardian does OpenAI deal, New York Times goes AI for newspaper content generation
“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world,” management fantasized.
-
The New York Times adopts AI tools in the newsroom
It isn’t clear how much AI-edited copy The Times will allow in published articles. The outlet promised that “Times journalism will always be reported, written and edited by our expert journalists,” in a memo it released last year, and it reaffirmed that commitment to human involvement a few months later.