The Death of The Economic Times (India Times): LLM Slop Presented as 'Articles', Containing Errors and Revisionism
Today I noticed a bizarre article (very outdated layoff figures and mindless nonsense) from a site or network I still deemed reputable. The mainstream English-speaking press in India is typically OK. The standards of reporting are typically high and sometimes they license articles from the likes of AP or NY Times.
This one was different and it's probably not an isolated case; it's just one that caught my eyes/mind only weeks after both NY Times and ProPublica openly admitted they had adopted slop.
They'd be better off shutting down operations with some dignity than resort to bots giving the false impression (illusion) of authorship.
Last year the Times of India reported it was having financial difficulties. Flooding the Web with fake articles is no panacea.
The following article may seem innocuous, especially given the site it is in:
They use some kind of JavaScript 'DRM' to prevent people copy-pasting text; it makes it hard to examine for misuse like LLM slop, but it's doable:
So this article is just blocks of slop:
The other day we said "Many Reports About Microsoft Layoffs Are LLM Slop Based on Other LLM Slop (From Microsoft-controlled LLMs That Downplay the Layoffs or Give Badly Outdated Data)". This is just another example of that. █