Ubuntu Slop and FUD Manufactured With LLMs and Funded (by Oneself) 'Studies'
LAST week we showed that Microsoft Canonical was spreading FUD [1, 2] to put a price tag on Ubuntu. It has just done so again ("Canonical is Using FUD to Sell Ubuntu, Having Paid for "Studies" (International Data Corporation (IDC), Marketing Company of IDG"*) and it's starting to remind us of what Red Hat did under IBM. And speaking of Ubuntu, recently a vulnerability was found and patched. It didn't take long for slopfarm to spread FUD based on it, using chatbots/LLMs, e.g.:
Fake 'article':
The same site also took real news about a Ubuntu-based distro and turned that into a bunch of LLM slop:
Also fake, as usual.
And if that's not bad enough, given the above-mentioned vulnerability, the other slopfarms were also at it. Shortly after the fake article from GBHackers News (mentioned the other day) its sister slopfarm did the same... only a few hours later, i.e. the usual:
"Google News" helped them both rise to high visibility levels. "Google News" rewards slopfarms while excluding the sites they're plagiarising.
Here's another one:
That's most likely (at best) a hybrid of LLM slop and some editing:
Slop and FUD are ruining the Web. They also ruin "Linux" news. █
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* As Ryan has just put it: "Wasn't IDC/IDG the ones that did the "Get The Facts" campaign [or Gartner] where Microsoft said the Total Cost of Windows was somehow lower? We figured out later that everyone who standardized on Windows and needed legacy support got to pay out the butt for it, and still had to throw out billions of dollars of working equipment and software when even the paid EOL support options dried up."