Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
LAST week we saw obvious LLM slop in Planet Ubuntu (or "Ubuntu Planet") and it wasn't the first time [1, 2, 3]. Planet Ubuntu is already quite empty, so this means the proportion of what's left that's also LLM slop is relatively high. It happened again less than a day ago:
Among the latest 10 posts in Planet Ubuntu at least 2 are LLM slop. This means that Planet Ubuntu is >20% slop, i.e. garbage.
If one avoids Planet Ubuntu and looks for news in Google, one might find fake articles that mimic real ones or simply plagiarise the real articles poorly, e.g.:
Or this:
This is LLM slop. Sadly, some people out there believe it's morally acceptable to fetch a bunch of word salads constructed using other people's work and then publish these like they're original works. Aside from the fact that the scraping does real damage (my personal Web site had to altogether block many IP addresses, even some false positives!), it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles. Over time accurate information will get "blurred away" [1, 2]. █