People Are Sick of LLM Slop. Offer Them Alternatives.
Do not expect anyone "out there" to get accustomed to or tolerate your slop. It'll just kill your site [1, 2] after it kills your credibility. Don't cross to the "dark side". It's just not worth it. Automattic selling wordpress.com down the river to "hey hi" (AI) alienated many people and didn't pay off.
Yesterday we explained why Wikipedia had lost its way. I occasionally hear from people (not "conservatives") who are fed up with Wikipedia for various reasons - not the subject of this article though - and every single day we debate among us (in our IRC network) the problem with LLMs, typically trained on sites like Wikipedia. Even moments ago we said (in IRC) that "slop (or LLM) bots are probably a nuisance and extra operating cost to statCounter and other sites that scan sites' logs."
We too have this issue because our "stats" are polluted by nasty bots. To quote from IRC: "LLM BS has no POSITIVE use! LLMs are a net loss to society... in every way. No LEGIT use case."
This is the general sentiment. They offload actual activity - i.e. human work - to people who aren't dispensable. DDoS protection, rolling back abusive edits, dealing with E-mail spam/SPAM composed by chatbots etc. (it can take longer to identify such messages as SPAM and there's risk of reply/phish).
Even some courts and judges blast firms that they discover have used chatbots to craft legal documents, adding cases that do not even exist! The latter is often the principal reason they get caught red-handed, unable to explain how it happened and who's responsible/accountable. It's a big problem and a growing burden on society. It's a human rights problem. Yesterday we said "LLM Slop Will Eventually Stop Due to High Costs, Worse Training Sets (Polluted Models Ingesting Their Own Junk), and No Real Returns", set aside copyright lawsuits.
That does not change the fact that the Web will remain littered and many people/companies lost productivity due to the nuisance of having to tackle slop. Or SLAPP for that matter.
As Alexandre Oliva put it some hours ago: "Now, some publishers and other service providers are resorting to LLM-generated bullshit that takes seconds of labor to make, and offering it to the public as if it had any sort of value, as if that made any economic sense."
Moments ago in IRC Ryan said: "I have gotten so enraged by the amount of LLM crap that there's only a few sites I even pay attention to anymore. We were better off in the days of Yahoo (with their own index) and the dmoz directory, and even Geocities."
Yes, DMOZ was OK [1, 2] and I had a site at Geocities when I was 15 or 16.
"One of the goals of the "modern" Web is to pluck people you don't want to speak out of the "community" and then nobody will hear anything they say," Ryan said. "So it becomes echo chambers of corporate-approved speech. If you do nothing and say nothing that they don't like, you can speak."
In our experience, our sites (this one and the sister site, which is focused on GNU/Linux since 2004) thrive and continue to grow because people want to escape the noise and the slop.
We never used LLM slop for anything and we never will.
To be clear, traffic from LLM scrapers is a lot worse than worthless and going "viral" in Social Control Media can be a curse, not a blessing. Some people learn this the hard way, e.g. when they get abuse (directly or indirectly) after reaching "fame" in a site like Reddit or 'Hacker' 'News' (or any of the "big ones"). Telling sites "oh, you should DEFINITELY be in Social Control Media for more traffic" is akin to telling a vegetarian, "oh, you're really missing out on protein by not trying meat!"
"Yeah," Ryan reminisced. "I had a lot of Reddit accounts get burned. After tens of thousands of likes. Reddit is not there for you. One got burned for asking in /r/linux how the Windows Notepad was related to Linux. Another got burned for exposing the agreement between Microsoft and Lenovo."
"So many get burned and it's not because you're writing bad "content" or anything that's "wrong"."
"Lenovo admitted publicly that they agreed to sabotage their computers, at Microsoft's request, to prevent other operating systems on them. My case against them fixed that. They had the moderators on /r/Linux block my account and lock the post, so I had to escalate, and at no point did the "news" say what I was doing behind-the-scenes after Lenovo said they would not fix it. And they fixed it, because the alternative was going to be....painful."
"It's not worth the key presses it takes to post most things to "social" media. Especially now that the government sees it as a trove to deport people and otherwise illegally f--k with them." (Ryan wrote about this yesterday)
Nowadays I often see sites like these offering chatbots (or "answers by AI") instead of real people having informed/peer-reviewed discussions in forums. They hope to "normalise" that as "sane business model" or "optimised for you" (Facebook openly said it would add chatbots to make up for a diaspora of users). This is doomed to fail.
"We must cut ties or at least cut back and approach it "mindfully"," Ryan said. "In some cases, like Facebook, they have made it so dangerous to use it, that I don't think anyone who knew what they were doing would use it. It's the same with anything else "Meta" owns, or Microsoft LinkedIn, or (God help us), "X". There was essentially little in the way of monetization of people's blogs on sites like GeoCities or LiveJournal. So they went under. The new "social media" got better at hurting people in ways that were less obvious than just displaying advertising."
Now that many people are fed up and leave they try to replace them with bots that entice people or increase "Screen Time" with slop, clickbait etc. Many vloggers threw in the towel, so instead people find "shorts" and "slop videos", likely made (originally) for TikTok.
"The dotcom crash happened because everything settled down from a manic VC phase where we worry about money later," Ryan added, "to something close to what those ad impressions were really worth. And today something similar is happening with LLMs."
"The news is talking about Trump's tariffs taking out companies that are "investing" in "AI". It makes all the things you need to do it with ungodly expensive, so it puts those imaginary future profits more obviously off into "never gonna happen"."
Months ago "the news" tried to blame "China" (DeepSeek) for the collapse, as if to paint it in nationalist terms rather than admit it was a giant bubble (even the Chinese knew that all along) and lack of technical/economic merit.
Ryan said, "I would add about DeepSeek that this is probably why Trump has imposed tariffs over 100% on China effective today, apparently. He's getting horrible advice telling him that Deepseek makes the Chinese more threatening because "AI wars". The truth is, they are threatening, because of their military modernization, but "AI" will never be worth anything."
It's a bubble; even Microsoft finally admits it (saying demand for LLM is down and datacentres need to be canceled, even ones already partly built). A phony anniversary has been leveraged to distract from these admissions.
Microsoft now lays off thousands of people, mostly in China. Windows is abandoned by Chinese OEMs (alternatives exist) and unlike in most of the world, in China ChatGPT is very small.
But "AI" is a smokescreen.
Ryan said about China: "They're building more and better ships, aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, they've even replaced the standard issue assault rifles with something much better, you know. That's what makes them a threat, and targeting "AI" is the wrong move. Even the Type 191 rifle is quite good. It shows you what they're really up to, which is a military that in every way will compete with or exceed the United States in maybe 10 years, if that."
"For now, I think the US Navy could still best China easily, because a fleet engagement wouldn't really give China a chance to shine. Some Arleigh Burke class destroyers with SM-2 and SM-3 missiles could stop the "carrier killer", that's just a misdirection. Their real goal is to invade Taiwan and see if we'll risk a war over it, and we won't. The US has put Taiwan in more danger, by escalating the situation, but I doubt we'll back that up. The embassy will burn things and evacuate. Lots of innocent people will die. It's sad that the President is getting such horrible advice that he thinks a Chinese chat bot is the threat here." █