Slopwatch: Google News, LinuxSecurity.com, and the General Demise of the Web
The "Slopwatch" series shows new examples of what's happening to the Web; on the surface it's not always obvious that many supposed or so-called "news" pages are just spewed out by some chatbots (or tools which help plagiarise original articles without getting caught; detection gets harder). If they are shallow and/or don't make much sense, then it's time to check.
What happened to Google News is a big problem for people who use Google for information about "Linux" (and almost anything else, e.g. layoffs [1, 2]).
Having made deep cuts to Google News, the company Google nowadays cannot tell the difference between real articles and LLM slop (with obvious slop images). Follow the incentive. Google itself helps people make slop, it has its own LLMs. This week it's linking a lot to a slopfarm, cybersecuritynews [1, 2, 3], and its sister slopfarm. New examples from Google News:
Notice how they misplace blame... on "Linux" and "BSD".
You want news about "BSD"? Here's some slop!!!
Another slopfarm, one called LinuxSecurity.com, has published this fake article:
100% chance that this is slop (LLM-generated garbage):
Pushing Rust using chatbots biased in its favour???
Whatever it is, the situation isn't good. The above is just a select crosscut; there's a lot more fake "reporting" out there. █