LLM Slop Will Eventually Stop Due to High Costs, Worse Training Sets (Polluted Models Ingesting Their Own Junk), and No Real Returns
This too shall pass
LLM slop is one heck of a nuisance. It's not innovative, it's just brute-force plagiarism (pretence of "fair use"). It makes AstroTurting (distortion of information) more efficient, but people will adapt. This morning, for instance, I saw this totally fake article from a notorious slopfarm that Google News continues to make visible if or when I look for "Linux" news.
Not only is the image slop; the text too is slop, made by LLMs.
There's something to be realised though, more so amid mass layoffs at Microsoft, shutdown of the "AI" lab [1, 2], datacentres getting cancelled en masse, and "Open" "AI" boasting about money that does not even exist (it's deep in debt and losing users - not many people paid attention to media reports about it due to chaff).
The bubble is already bursting. On Saturday we said NVIDIA Corp - the main beneficiary of all this hype - had lost 36% of its "value". The hardware industry will suffer even more from the tariffs. Asustek Computer Inc has just fallen about 10% in one day and Quanta Computer Inc fell almost 20% in a week. Forget all about "hey hi" (AI) PCs. It's nothing but hype. Microsoft too has moved on (past it, knowing it failed).
We hope to leave behind all this stupid nonsense, just as we left "metaverse" behind and quit calling everything "smart" or "IoT" (the latest trend is to just rebrand everything as "Advanced" or "Generative" or "Agentic" "hey hi").
Forget about an "hey hi arms race". The real war is waged by a face-painted bigot in the Oval Office. The press began talking a lot more about "tariffs", not "hey hi".
Unlike "hey hi" (typically the press means slop, not intelligence), tariffs are a real thing.
Google News is becoming really bad; it might be one of the casualties of LLMs, being unable to quickly distinguish slopfarms (telling them apart). Heck, Google itself contributes to this problem, under the banner/name "Gemini". Right now the "news industry" is fuming at Google, which gives people slop (remember "Suggest"?) or links/diverts searchers to slopfarms instead of original articles. I don't mean to brag, but said it over a decade ago; I argued that this would happen and Google was extremely unreliable; like Facebook, it does not want people to find real information outside Facebook (it's the same for the press, just like Social Control Media).
Search engines won't be "replaced" by LLMs, but more people will hopefully learn to choose sites based on their reputation, e.g. search WebMD for medical information and use a real dictionary rather than ask Google.
Google is not your friend. Google is a slopfest. █